


ice-cold flowers so far from the sun

by evocates



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) RPF, Star Wars RPF
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Organised Crime, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Class Issues, Consent Issues, Control Issues, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Consent, M/M, Power Imbalance, Stockholm Syndrome, The Situation is Ideal for No One, They Are Both Exceedingly Problematic, This is a Fic About the Damages That Come from Deeply Internalised Class Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-11-22 00:08:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11368503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates
Summary: Wen’s power had grown throughout the years, and along with it the signs of his age, down the edgings of grey at his brows. Sometimes, in the midst of sleep, Donnie imagined Jiang Wu – or even Si-si – telling him that Wen had died, outsmarted by someone younger, turned into nothing but a faceless corpse in someone else’s mountain.Sometimes, he couldn’t tell whether those were nightmares, or if they were wishful dreams.Hands overspilling with debts to repay cannot hold onto love. But empty hands cannot weave the threads to hold love close either.Half an AU: Donnie is still Donnie, but Jiang Wen is now the leader of a major triad organisation. Please note the tags and warnings.Complete.





	1. Prologue: 他和她都是快乐的人, “he and she both know happiness”

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Niney](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niney/gifts).



> [Niney](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Niney) requested for a “triad AU” for fightbackfic, and left it up for me for which fandom and characters. Niney has also very patiently tolerated my endless ramblings on RPF for this pairing, and for some reason really adores the dark stuff. Therefore, this is what I have come up with.
> 
> The title is translated from a line in [The Loner from the Far-off North](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhL1Zc-dZ_o) by Hua Zhou. (Full translated lyrics are [here on my tumblr](http://evocating.tumblr.com/post/162477412854/hua-zhou-the-loner-from-the-far-off-north).) This is it is the original Chinese: **远离阳光冰冷的花**. All chapter titles will come from the same song. Beginning notes of each chapter will also contain the translated lyrics.
> 
> Resources that might be helpful when reading the fic: Donnie’s [filmography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Yen_filmography), and these [two](http://vivelamori.tumblr.com/post/160121540259/donnie-yens-autobiography-all-about-donnie) [posts](http://vivelamori.tumblr.com/post/160410560589/donnie-yen-autobiography-all-about-donnie) on vivelamori’s tumblr where she translated parts of his autobiography concerning his childhood and interactions with the triads.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Massive power imbalances. People making very bad decisions that are morally grey at best and completely immoral at worst. Mentions and depiction of violence associated with organised crime, alongside class issues. Depiction of a controlling, abusive relationship that is very close to and might even _be_ Stockholm Syndrome, portrayed primarily from the POV of the victim.
> 
> Everyone is problematic in this fic, especially Jiang Wen and Donnie. 
> 
> **Disclaimer:** All a product of imagination. Definitely didn’t happen. No disrespect meant. This is archive-locked so no one associated with them will see it. Also, just so that it is absolutely clear: _depiction does not equate to endorsement_. Please keep this in mind. Think of this as very, very dark versions of the personas of these men; of the kind of people they _could_ be if circumstances are different.
> 
> Beta'd by [kikibug13](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kikibug13).

_London, 2016_

Dressed in a faded graphic t-shirt with his thumbs hooked over the belt loops of his washed-out jeans, Wu’s brother seemed to blend more into the shadows cast by the chandelier overhead than stand out amidst its soft yellow light. He did not, either, look like a man who held the lives of many, twined like threads around the loose-curled fingers at his sides.

Wu closed the sliding door behind him. He bowed, one arm sweeping out from the waist. “Da-ge,” he greeted.

His brother did not move. As Wu approached, he noticed that those dark eyes seemed to pierce through the large windows of this restaurant’s private room to fix in the southwest direction. Towards, if Wu was not mistaken, Hyde Park. 

As far as Wu could remember, his brother had never been here before – had never liked leaving the Chinese side of the Asian continent, and hated crossing the ocean – so surely there was no reason for him to stare so hard. But, he corrected himself, his brother might have concerns that he would never understand. 

“I’ve heard it said that there are many different kinds of birds who rest their wings on the lake, or even amidst its trees and grass,” his brother said. He turned away from the window, eyes sliding past Wu without focusing on him as he walked towards the large round dining table. He picked up the round ceramic teapot, and poured the tea with fingers placed on the lid. “They should not be fed, right? Or touched.”

Long years had gotten Wu used to the way his brother spoke; in circles around the topic instead of ploughing on straight ahead. He would think it a symptom of the darkness that surrounded that form that was so much like his own if he hadn’t known his older brother even before he stepped into it.

Picking up the teacup, he sipped at it. He didn’t sit down. “You’re not going to ask for him to come to you, then.” It was a statement, not a question.

Laughing, his brother shook his head. He dropped down onto a chair, immediately raising his legs to rest his heels on the cushion of another. In contrast to the faded jeans, his shoes were leather, wrinkled but still glossily expensive. “Can’t I visit my brother during the height of his success?” he asked, raising an eyebrow over the rim of the cup. 

Despite himself, Wu snorted. He sat down himself, and tucked his feet against the back of his chair’s legs. “Is it my success,” he cocked his head to the side, “or is it yours?”

“Are you insinuating that I am a terrible brother, selfishly scrambling at the success of my kin to fill my own empty hands?” The upward twitch of his lips had Wu chuckling even as a cold chill ran down his spine. “Surely my successes aren’t _that_ paltry.”

“I would not know,” Wu said. He was careful to keep his tone light, and did not give into the urge to hide his mouth with the teacup. For one, it was too small. For another… Well, he had never seen his brother angry, and he had no real wish to witness such a thing. Especially here, in this enclosed room with the restaurant’s staff instructed to stay far away until they were called.

His cup clacked softly against the heavy glass of the wooden table. He kept his hands by his lap, and his small smile fixed upon his lips, as his brother picked up the teapot again. “You do,” Wu heard, his brother’s voice barely above a whisper. “Your eyes are not the eyes of the world.”

Under the world’s eyes, there were words and ideas filed under Wu’s name. There were accomplishments his hands had never touched that were neatly tucked, pedestal-like, beneath his feet. 

The tea was fresh and green on his tongue. Wu swallowed, and looked at the dark, swirling liquid. Green tea, a strange choice for a restaurant; likely an accommodation for a man whose feet had never touched these wooden floors before this day. A request made by a man who knew well enough what his brother liked, and had long stopped asking if he wanted to be catered to.

“No,” Wu said. He placed the cup down, and smiled. “They are not.” A few lies, a few pretences. Those were minor inconveniences to be endured; dutiful younger brothers should be used to doing much more.

A knock on the doorframe. Before Wu could turn around, before he could open it and shooed whoever it was behind it away, it opened.

“Call for a Mister Jiang Wen.” The voice was young and almost sweet, the Mandarin lilted in ways that had the hot, humid breezes of Sham Shui Po wafting through the gap of the door. The face that poked through was that of a woman, barely more than a girl, and she was biting her lip as she held out a telephone.

At the table, Wu’s brother sipped his tea. “I am having dinner with my brother,” he said, every word evenly enunciated.

The girl opened her mouth. Before she could speak, however, Wu was already out of his seat. He was still too late: by the time he reached the door, pale fingers had already plucked the phone from the girl’s hand.

“We are taking a break from business,” Wu’s sister-in-law said. Her lips were pulled upwards into a smile that did not reach her eyes. “Whoever is calling will understand.” 

Surely Wu’s own reflexes had been dulled since the last time he stepped into the shadows, for he had no idea from where Zhou Yun had appeared; had no idea she was even _here,_ in this restaurant. His breath hitched as she dipped her head down towards the girl, the waitress, and her wrist flashed white as she turned the phone around to hand it back to her.

“I am his wife,” Zhou Yun assured the girl. Behind Wu, his brother’s cup landed on the glass of the table with the quiet _click_. “Please take the phone away, and bring us the menus instead.”

Wide-eyed, the girl looked from Wu to Zhou Yun and then towards where Wu’s brother was seated behind them both. He could practically feel the rattle in her lungs as she came to a decision, and dipped her head down. “Of course.” The words that tumbled from her lips were in English. “Sirs. Ma’am.”

Her footsteps echoed down the narrow hallway as she left. Inexperienced in these matters, Wu noted, but there was some potential in her: she did not try to run, and every _thud_ was soft and steady enough to keep the mask of politeness. Wu watched her go, deliberately avoiding Zhou Yun’s gaze, before he turned around. The door clicked shut behind him.

“Yun.”

Brushing past Wu as she headed for the table, the woman held out a hand. As he watched, his brother took those long fingers and folded them before he brought the knuckles to his mouth. His eyes remained on his wife, gaze unwavering.

“The boys were getting impatient,” Zhou Yun said. She swept a hand over the back of her qipao, and lowered herself daintily into the chair opposite of Wu’s. “They were begging me to retrieve you.”

“I promised them the whole of tomorrow,” Wu’s brother said, sounding amused. He picked up the teapot again.

“They know, and are placated,” Zhou Yun returned. She closed both hands around the cup that her husband poured for her, and sipped at it. The dull ceramic could not cut the sharpness of her smile. “Still, I thought my presence necessary.”

There were women, Wu knew, who were born and bred in those shadows that his brother had mired himself in; women who had learned all of their lives to navigate in the darkness. Wu’s knowledge of them was sparse – his brother preferred that he allowed the black edges to barely brush his skin, and he, in turn, favoured obedience to that wish – but he knew, without a doubt, that there were very few like Zhou Yun. His brother always managed to find the rarest of people, after all.

A memory flashed across his mind: a man, five years older than Wu himself but with only light creases on the sides of his eyes; a man who made his living through fighting but with his knuckles still silk-smooth enough to glimmer in the moonlight; a man with shadows clinging to his ankles, threatening to drag him down, but could still smile enough to capture the bright sunshine.

Wu was not in London on behalf of his brother, or even for the sake of his career. He took a flight, and signed away five months of his life, because he needed another glance; because he needed to be _sure_.

The girl had returned, this time accompanied by a much older woman. They bowed in tandem, holding out the restaurant’s menus with both hands. No apology was issued, and Wu gave them the barest hint of a smile before he took the thin, bound books. He shut the door as he turned around.

“This is a family trip,” he said, placing the menus in front of his brother and his sister-in-law, keeping none for himself. “Isn’t it?”

“I have never seen London,” Zhou Yun said, and sipped her tea. Wu’s brother did not say a word.

He didn’t have to. Wu remembered well enough the weight and length of that gaze, stretching out towards Hyde Park as if trying to pin the whole place down with his mind alone. He remembered, too, that man with the smile – wide enough to show gums – and his excitement about exploring London. He sipped his tea. The bitterness did not choke him; he was used to it.

Both of them were looking at him. He pulled his lips up into a smile.

“After the premiere, I will have time,” he said. He tipped his head back, draining the last of the tea. “I will accompany all of you to the park, then.”

There were plenty of tales of younger brothers who feared growing up under their older brothers’ shadows. Wu had heard them all, and laughed. For his own brother surrounded himself with shadows aplenty. So much that the sun’s light pouring down upon him only marked the ground beneath his feet as something that belonged to him; so much that all other shadows that touched the same ground trailed threads, thin and weak, back up to twine around his fingertips.

See, Wu had never told, and yet his brother knew, nonetheless: during filming, he liked to follow Donnie to Hyde Park to watch him feed the geese.

The ceramic cup made no sound as he placed it back onto the table. His brother was smiling at him, bare creases at the corners of his eyes. When he opened the menu, the edges of glossy pages caught the air-conditioning’s breeze, fluttering and rustling. 

His brother said, “I look forward to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jiang Wu is Jiang Wen’s actual real life brother, and he is also an actor. If you watched _Let the Bullets Fly_ , the man who is said to train Huang’s guards – Wu Ji Chong/Wu-jiuren – is played by him.
> 
> Da-ge: 大哥, a term in Chinese to refer to one’s older brother. It is also a term used by gangsters and outlaws to refer to their leader.


	2. 有一样伪善的嘴, “with the same hypocritical smiles”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 你和我都是孤独的鬼  
> You and I are both lonely ghosts  
> 有一样伪善的嘴  
> With the same hypocritical smiles.  
> 他和她都是快乐的人  
> He and she both know happiness,  
> 看不到生命可悲  
> They can't see life's laments.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings:** Depiction of blood and gore that is common amongst triad loansharking activities. Intense consent issues, especially when concerning BDSM: un-negotiated BDSM, un-negotiated and dubiously consensual exhibitionism and voyeurism, unrecognised subspace, absolutely _terrible_ BDSM etiquette. _Incredibly_ messed up power dynamics, edging close towards Stockholm Syndrome.

_Hong Kong, 1997_

The hallway stank of blood.

In front of him, the elevator doors squeaked as they tried to close. His hand slammed against the edge, and it let out a series of panicked beeps before he stepped through the threshold. The bare concrete floor beneath his worn sneakers was clean.

He walked. His footsteps echoed, the sound beating against his ears, twisting with the stench of congealing, drying blood to engrave even deeper into his bones. But this was not the first time, so he was nearly used to it all by now: the keys in his hands did not jangle, loud and ringing, as he stopped in front of his apartment door.

There, written with what seemed like a thick brush, like those used for painting walls: 欠錢還錢, _him cin waan cin_. His lips twisted into a thin line, and he nearly laughed. Even in blunter English, _owe money pay money_ still held on tightly to its knife-like edge. 

Of course, the pig’s head stapled by its ears onto the hollow wood didn’t help either. Neither did the opened shutter, its hinges creaking with a nudge from his foot. He had shut and locked it this morning.

At least the door itself was still intact. Donnie slipped his key into the lock, though he wasn’t surprised when turning it did nothing. He pulled out the useless key, and pushed the door. When he could see the lightwood floor of his apartment, something fluttered down from the doorframe. It was white, the colour brilliantly stark against the rust-red that had creeped beneath the door. As Donnie watched, the edges of the envelope slowly darkened, stained by the drying blood. If he didn’t pick it up, it would be so soaked that none of the words would be legible.

He left it there on the floor. He had received enough eviction notices by now to recognise them on sight. The wording, he reckoned, wouldn’t be very different. He had no interest in finding out how much effort this particular landlord would put into pretending politeness when kicking him out. He didn’t think it would be very much: here, in Hung Hom, one of the most rundown parts of Kowloon, his name held no real currency.

Not that it did anywhere else, these past years.

Throwing his keys onto the tilting, half-collapsed shoe rack, he made to kick off his sneakers. He stopped. There, another scent. Heavy like blood, but in a different way; familiar as iron in the air, but different in that way, too.

Cigarette smoke. Footsteps. The opened shutter and busted door lock flashed across Donnie’s eyes again. He lifted his head.

Above the shoe rack, there was a hook, old and rusty and which his fingers had never touched. The clothes he had thrown to the ground this morning, before leaving, had been placed on plastic hangers that now swung on the hook. Back and forth, back and forth.

“Sorry.” The words were in Mandarin. The voice was deep, with a rough edge like gravel, and low like the sharp spice of burning tobacco at the base of the throat. “I would’ve cleaned up a bit more, but they told me that you’re already coming back.”

Donnie turned around.

There was a man leaning against the doorway of his bedroom. His arms were crossed across his chest. A hint of dark yellow flashed against his pale, thin lips. His nails were tinged a lighter shade, Donnie noted, but when he took a drag, his teeth flashed brilliantly white. White like the eviction letter—no, Donnie corrected himself. The blood had soaked through, and it was red, now.

“You don’t remember me,” the man said.

Beneath his feet, Donnie could feel the stickiness of drying blood creeping into his socks. The red crawled up his nerves, twisted with his throat, and he felt his head jerk backwards. Dark laughter burst out despite himself, and his shoulders shook. 

“You’re a difficult man to forget.”

Two years ago, in a jail cell: Donnie’s knuckles bloodied from the eight men he had just sent to the hospital; this man pristine except for the hints of smeared ash-grey on his sleeves. Seven years ago, in a bar in Beijing: his knuckles white and his nails bloodied against the wall of the filthy bathroom, this man’s smoke-tinged breath against his ear, the softness of his jaw scraped by Donnie’s stubble.

That softness was gone now. The smile had grown even sharper. In that bar so long ago, Donnie had felt the hardness of a knife’s handle jostling against his ass with every thrust inside him. Now… Now the knives were in the darkness of those eyes, in the glass-shard harshness of the jaw as cheeks hollowed and smoke escaped from between teeth.

He approached. Donnie didn’t move; only parted his lips when the cigarette came close. He tilted his head and lidded his eyes when the filter pressed against his bottom lip. It was spit-soaked, fish-lipped, but Donnie pressed down the instinctive urge to gag as he drew the tobacco into his lungs. He didn’t repress the shudder when fingers – callused and scarred – closed around the nape of his neck, and nails dragged downwards.

“How much do you owe them?”

“Too much,” Donnie returned, breathing the words out with the smoke. He grinned, showing his teeth, as his hand closed around the soft flesh of one bicep. “Far too much to be repaid by a seven-year-old fuck with a man who still won’t give me his name.”

The chuckle came from the bottom of the chest pressed tight against his own. The man tilted his head.

Two years ago, they hadn’t spoken to each other, for there hadn’t been time. Barely moments after Donnie was tossed into the cell, one of the guards had come in to retrieve this man. Later, when Donnie had asked his police contacts, his friend stared at him as if he had gone insane: the records had shown that the cell had been completely empty when Donnie had entered the police station, and he had been the only person who had occupied it within the last three-day period.

Ghosts were common enough in myths. Ghosts with solid form, ghosts with strong, callused hands that could splay over his chest to write characters across his ribs… there was only one explanation for them. Knives in pockets transmogrified into knives in eyes. Blood dripping from hands; blood soaked in between the teeth.

“Jiang Wen,” Donnie drawled out, reading the characters scrawled onto his chest. He arched backwards, shoulders shifting against the rough whitewashed wall, as nails found the spaces between his ribs and dug in, dragging sideways for the last trailing stroke of 文. “You’ve been promoted, haven’t you?” 

“Mm,” Jiang Wen said. He smiled, and it would be sweet, the pleasure in it, if his thumb wasn’t tracing the curve of Donnie’s cheek. “High enough that I can indulge in some of my whims.”

“Whims,” Donnie repeated. He let his eyes fall shut, pushing away his instincts, as that thumb moved down to his throat, running tiny circles around the knot there down to the hollow. “Is that what this is?”

Another chuckle. This time, it rumbled through his own bones, for Jiang Wen had pressed him flush against the wall, now, one knee driving between Donnie’s thighs, dangerously close to his crotch. “I do have other words,” the man said. Smoke, wet and thick like ink, escaped from his lips to sink into Donnie’s lungs. “But I have to wonder… You’re not behaving like a man in desperate debt.”

“My knees don’t take well to grovelling,” Donnie said, light.

“That’s a good line,” Jiang Wen said. He switched his cigarette to the other hand, and flicked it. The ash floated down to mix in with the congealed blood that had embedded itself into spaces between the floorboards. Dripping, no doubt, into the apartment below. “I will remember it.”

The cigarette butt followed the ash. Donnie closed his eyes, and though his hand tightened around the bicep beneath his fingers, he didn’t pull away when lips pressed against his own.

Seven years ago, Jiang Wen had kissed messily, sloppily, awkwardness in every move that belied his age even though his eyes had been already old. Now, there was a deliberateness in the scrape of his teeth over Donnie’s lip, in the prod of his tongue between his teeth. In the soft scrapes of his nail over the nape of his neck, as if he had remembered precisely just how sensitive Donnie was, in that spot.

When they broke apart, Donnie said, “Still far too much for one fuck to repay.”

“What makes you think this would only be one?” Jiang Wen said.

Donnie stilled. “What?”

There was no answer. Nothing except for the chill of air breezing through them from the open window – he had closed it in the morning – as Jiang Wen stepped backwards. The _click_ of a lighter rang out, staccato to steady footsteps as the man headed over to the rickety, plastic dining table crammed to the side of this tiny, box-like apartment. When his cheeks hollowed, when smoke escaped from his lips, it didn’t – _couldn’t_ – distract from the sharpness of his gaze.

“You’re making a movie,” he said. Donnie nodded, and he smiled, hoisting himself up to sit on the table’s edge. He crossed his legs, and cocked his head to the side. “How much confidence do you have in it?”

It was an easy question. Donnie had answered it a thousand times; had dragged out his passion and enthusiasm for this story he was making whenever he spoke to people he was borrowing money from. He had gone on for hours about cinematography, about storytelling, about characterisation.

But those dark eyes on him dried up all of the words, and left his hands empty. He clenched them, nails digging into his own palms, and he looked away. “What do you know about movie-making?” he heard himself ask. 

“Try me,” Jiang Wen said. He reached over to the other side of the table, dragging over the clean and empty ashtray that had been overflowing this morning. “I daresay that you’d be surprised.”

He should be used to this; the filmmaking industry in Hong Kong was filled with shadow-smeared fingerprints. But Jiang Wen was from Beijing, evident enough in the very dialect he spoke, in the lilt of the Mandarin that was familiar and alien both. He wasn’t part of Hong Kong, wasn’t part of all of the shadows that Donnie had used to skirt the edges of and was now drowning in, but…

It wasn’t surprising, either, that things were nearly the same in the mainland. It wasn’t surprising, either, that this man’s eyes could strip him down to the bones when no one else seemed to be able to.

A pack of cigarettes held out to him with nicotine-stained fingers. Donnie took it with his own hands steady. Then, with one white and yellow stick dangling between his lips, he leaned in. The lighter clicked again, and smoke slipped down his throat.

“Even if you refuse, I will still pay your debts for you,” Jiang Wen said. His voice was as quiet as those ghost-like touches skimming over Donnie’s jaw. “But you wouldn’t want me to do that, do you?”

“No,” Donnie agreed. There was more he could say: there was dignity in keeping his back straight and shoulders stiff even as he crawled back to Kowloon. Not to Mongkok; not to that squatter village that his father had worked so hard to find ways for all of them to escape from, but Hung Hom, now, because Mongkok had become too expensive. Broken down apartment buildings to replace broken down wooden huts, but almost the same, in the end.

There was a pride in owning up to his mistakes, in standing there and taking their blows, letting his bones break to protect the centre that he already knew was hollow. There were words to frame how it was better, somehow, to live in squalor knowing that he had earned everything, than to live in luxury and see the threads of it all leading to someone else’s fingers.

But Donnie had never been good with words. Yet he looked into Jiang Wen’s eyes, framed by raised brows, and he thought, there was no need to explain, for this man already knew. 

When Jiang Wen lifted the ashtray, Donnie crushed the cigarette into it. He plucked the one in Jiang Wen’s hand and tossed it as well. He waited for retaliation, but there was only the slow spreading of thighs, and the fall of long-fingered, thick-palmed hands onto the rickety wooden table. There was only the upward tilt of the chin.

Donnie took a step forward. He cupped Jiang Wen’s face, brushing his fingers over the curve of those cheekbones turned sharp through the years. His calluses traced lightly over the lines carved deep into the corners of those dark eyes; lines that had not been there seven years ago, when the smile now turned to him was molasses-sweet instead of blood-metallic. 

“You didn’t ask this of me seven years ago,” he noted.

Fingers came up to close around his wrists, running light over the spaces between the fragile bones; the bones Donnie used to practice to keep limber so he could play the piano.

“Seven years ago,” Jiang Wen said, and his smile was wry and so small, “there was nothing you needed that I could give.” One hand rose, and fingers trailed over the edges of Donnie’s hairline, tugging on the short strands there. “Seven years ago, there was nothing I could do to make you look at me, and only me.”

 _You’re wrong_ , Donnie thought. Seven years ago, Beijing’s Mandarin filling the air around him, alienating and stifling both. Seven years ago, a pair of dark eyes and a crooked smile, distorted through the light of a filthy bar but still brilliant enough to draw him forward with legs that tripped over themselves. Even two years ago, in the jail cell, his heart in his throat that had squeezed all of the words out, his fingers tangling together, helpless and hopeless, as he had watched this man’s back as he had walked away without speaking.

Jiang Wen understood the pride of broken bones. In turn, Donnie understood the pride that came out of hands that knew how to tangle around strings instead of bodies.

He leaned forward. Their foreheads touched, and Jiang Wen’s breath shuddered against his lips. His hand rose and fell upon the nape of Donnie’s neck, nails once more digging in. Donnie closed his eyes, and remembered the gentleness of smoke-tinged breath against the curve of his ear; remembered the loose curl of one arm around his waist.

“I’m still not looking only at you,” Donnie said. “I’m looking also at your money.”

A soft chuckle ghosting over the corner of his lips. Fingers in his hair, grip tightening over the strands to pull his head back, forcing him to bare his throat. Donnie closed his eyes, swallowing hard at the feel of rough calluses sliding, so light, over his pulse point.

“That,” Jiang Wen said, “is a lapse of attention I can afford.”

The stench of blood thick in Donnie’s nose. An envelope soaked with rust-red engraved at the back of his eyes. Looming shadows behind his back. The voices of creditors made into half-solid form with enough breath to skitter over his neck. Bits and pieces of film, half-complete in editing. Tiny things with an inconsequentiality that weighed down on his bones. 

All of them less real than the man in front of him, yet he could see them better than Jiang Wen’s face, fading away into the background of his filthy apartment’s walls when his eyes were half-lidded like this. Donnie smiled, and lied: “You can.” 

Fingers tightened on the back of his shirt. Donnie breathed in through his nose, and relaxed his body enough to allow Jiang Wen to flip them over, sprawling him upon his own dining table. He allowed his legs to fall open, and his hands reached up to grip tight onto the collar of that white shirt, dragging the other man down for another kiss.

For there was one thing he had learned well about mistakes: there was no way to turn time back, and all that he could do was to try to put back together the shattered pieces that had yet to fall through his hands.

The hands that dropped all that they could have been were not merely Jiang Wen’s, but also his own. 

***

_Hong Kong and Beijing, 2017_

The day before he left Hong Kong, Donnie headed north from Victoria Peak to the Tsz Shan Monastery. He drove through the thick forests with the windows of his car down, breathing in the sweet, green-scented air that was tinged just slightly with burning gasoline from the cars that passed. The marble paleness of the Goddess of Mercy rose ahead even before he could catch a single glimpse of the grey-thatched roofs of the building itself, but he avoided looking at it.

He left his car halfway up the hill, near the MTR station. Even this early in the year, the sun was already out, its light piercing while the sharp chill of winter winds crept beneath the scarf he had wrapped around his neck. He adjusted his sunglasses where they were perched on the bridge of his nose, shoved his hands into his pockets, and climbed the rest of the way.

It did not take long; his legs were barely burning before he stopped. Standing at the entrance of the monastery, Donnie removed his glasses. He tipped his head up, and took in the sight of the gleaming white statue. The goddess’s hands caught his gaze: index and middle fingers of one folded to hold onto a ball with the thumb, with the other two slightly extended upwards; a slim jar held in the other. 

The jar was tipped on its side, its rim beckoning. He slipped the glasses back on, and headed in that direction.

Incense curled around the edge of his senses, growing stronger as he approached. He picked up two of sticks, placing the tips into the mouth of the metal column that shielded the tall candles within. The scent was heavy enough to rest on his tongue now, the taste impossible to describe, and he flicked his wrist to remove the lingering ash. He headed into the temple, and paid his customary respects.

A little distance away, a mother guided her young son towards the thick ropes that led to the bells. They clanged as the child pulled, the sound staccato to the clacking of _qiuqian_ sticks being shaken in their wooden containers, and _jiaobei_ blocks being flung to the floor. As Donnie knelt to kowtow three times, an old man’s voice grew louder, clearly unhappy with the reading the monk had given him for the line written on the _qiuqian_ stick that had fallen out for his shaking.

Unfolding his legs, Donnie stood. He tucked his face against his shoulder to smile as he placed his incense sticks with the others in the carved bronze bowl. When he stood back, a small breeze caught on the tips, dislodging the grey ash to reveal the bright orange embers that glowed bright against the pale blue sky.

Donnie had never been a particularly religious man; he was simply not brought up that way. His mother and father both preferred taking matters into their own hands; they did not wait for their prayers to be answered, and rarely even spared the time required to head for the temples to pray. The altar in their house was a shrine for duty instead of faith: the names of his father’s grandparents engraved in gold on wood. His father used to tell him stories of how he would carry those tablets, wrapped in newspapers, up the boat that took him from Guangdong to Hong Kong. His mother would laugh, then, and point out spots on the tablets where the ink had smeared to stain the tablets permanently.

This was not a pilgrimage. This was merely the first step of a ritual.

Respects paid, Donnie avoided the crowds headed inside the main building to duck around the back. He headed up the staircase, eyes unwavering on one particular building. The wind picked up, biting at his lips. He took a long, deep breath, and locked within his lungs the sweet, sharp rush of running water.

The bells at the top of the hill were chiming. Not the resounding clang of the bells that hung in front of the great statues in the main building, but deeper; the difference between a child’s giggle, and a man’s chuckle. Or, Donnie thought, gaze flicking downwards, the difference between the lightness of river-scented air and the deep, slow-running water that ran beneath. 

Donnie dug his fingers into his pocket, and brought out the pouch that he had prepared before leaving the house. He withdrew the coins from it, and tossed them into the stream. Metal clinked against stone, heralding the slap of his hands together as he bowed his head. Through his lowered lashes, he spotted pure white again: the rim of the jar in the Goddess of Mercy’s hand. The symbol of running water, blessed to cleanse.

Quiet _plips_. Donnie lifted his head, and watched as the monk in the corner slipped the wooden ladle into the water, scraping against the edges of the stone trough. The flowers dropped inside – chrysanthemums and carnations, mostly, with a couple of stalks of jasmine – swirled amidst the ripples, some of the petals coming loose to follow the trail left behind by the ladle. Heavy-headed, the flowers dipped beneath the surface of the water before rising again, droplets catching the light and throwing yellow and orange and red everywhere.

Flowers soaked in water blessed by the visage of the Goddess of Mercy. Donnie stood at the side, silent, as the monk picked them up and allowed them to dry before dropping them into a plastic bag. Donnie took it, leaving the handle to dangle on his wrist as he clapped his hands together again in the customary gesture of thanks, of worship. The monk lowered his head in acknowledging return.

Then Donnie turned. He left the monastery behind with swift steps. The weight of the flowers made the plastic bag crinkle as it smacked against his thigh. With one hand on the hood of his car, he breathed in the scent of fresh air. He did not turn to glance at the Goddess of Mercy. 

He drove home. The flowers he tucked into his check-in luggage, in the pocket he had long ago dedicated to them. He did not turn away from Si-si’s gaze, but she did not speak a word. She only closed her fingers around his wrist, and led him to their bed.

Now he was in Beijing, settled in the Hilton hotel that he had suggested to Vin and the crew to stay in while they were here. The flowers had long dried, and the loose petals were soft beneath his fingertips. They wrinkled easily at a touch, and broke when he pressed his nail lightly against one. He tipped his hand to the side, and watched the petals fall into the bathtub.

Reaching out, he turned the water on. Reds and pinks and yellows swirled. More petals broke apart under the force of the bubbles caused by the spray. It was lucky, Donnie thought, that the flowers did not need to be pristine. 

(The flowers didn’t need to be anything. The flowers didn’t need to _be_. This was not a pilgrimage. This was merely a ritual. Something he did, without any need for there to be meaning behind it.) 

Water lapped at his feet as he stepped into the tub. Soap burst into lather, blossoming thickly enough to nearly drown the flowers as he poured the gel. He dropped to his knees, the sound of the water beat against the walls of the spacious bathroom muffling the noise of bone hitting porcelain. Donnie tipped his head back. Petals and liquid dripped from his fingers as he lifted a single chrysanthemum, and ran it over his neck. Petals broke apart, scattering, as he ran them over his face, carefully curving around his eyes.

Si-si had asked, the first time he had gone to the temple, what he needed the flowers for. Donnie had told her that it was to wash away the filth of the airplane, and to prepare himself for work in a new place. She had smiled and accepted the answer. She had not called him out on his lie, for he went through the ritual even when he didn’t step inside an airport.

His breath bubbled as he dipped his head below the water. Petals brushed across his lips, too light to be a kiss. His tongue darted out, tasting the alkaline of the soap, before he lifted his head. He picked up another flower. This time, he ran it over his chest, making sure to cover every single inch. His hands did not shake; he had done this enough that stilling the twitches had become ingrained reflex.

By the time he stepped out from the bathtub, none of the flowers were intact. The torn pieces of petals clogged the drain. His fingers curved like a ladle as he bent to pick up the pieces. Plastic crinkled with wet weight as he tossed them into the trash.

White shirt. Black pants. White blazer with matching black silk for the lapels, the colour dull against the gleam of the cloth. A black handkerchief, neatly folded, tucked into the blazer’s pocket. He tipped his head back and did not meet his own eyes as he tied a strip of black cloth into a bowtie. His head dipped down into his chest, and he looked at himself.

The outfit was precisely the one he had worn to London, barely a few months ago. Beneath the cloth, his skin itched with cleanliness. He turned away from the mirror as a knock resounded on the door.

A woman stood on the other side. Her long hair was loosely braided and coiled into a bun held together with thin sticks that, he was sure, were blade-sharp. She was dressed in an emerald green dress better suited to a ballroom than a hotel’s hallway.

Donnie smiled, and inclined his head. “Zhou-shi,” he murmured in greeting, giving her the respect due to the wives of noblemen recorded to history.

“Mister Zhan,” Zhou Yun said, tongue curling mirth around his name like it always did. “As polite as ever, I see.” She held out a hand, palm facing the ceiling. Donnie placed his own into it, and averted his eyes from the fold of her thumb over his knuckles.

But shadows of petals floated across the back of his lids anyway. So many broke as he scrubbed them over his skin. Now he could feel the filth creeping back in.

“Come,” she said, taking a step back. Her silver heels clicked against the mosaic floor; the stiletto did not wobble in the gaps between the tiles. “He is waiting.”

Careful to not take too deep a breath, Donnie nodded. He stepped out of the room. The _beep_ and _whirr_ of the door locking by itself did not, he told himself, sound ominous. Neither did her fingers feel cold where they were wrapped around his.

They headed down to the lobby. A man at the reception glanced over, but his teeth clacked back together the moment his eyes landed on Zhou Yun. He ducked his head down, and the woman’s shoulders shook with stifled mirth. Her heels clicked on the now-marble floor as she led Donnie down a hallway tucked into the side of the lobby, a herald unlike the silent elevator button.

Zhou Yun’s hand dropped back to her side as the doors opened. Here, the walls were made of glass, and spread out the view of Beijing at night time before him. Donnie knew his cue: he kept his fingers frozen in the air and faced the door as the elevator started and rose up to the highest floor of the hotel.

The penthouse suite. Donnie had rarely known this man to provide anything less.

Polished metal shuddered beneath his feet as the elevator came to a stop. Zhou Yun stepped backwards as the door opened. Donnie was used to it by now, so it took little for him to even out his breathing again as he took a single step out. He placed his hand upon the one waiting for him.

“Wen,” he greeted.

Dark eyes curved upwards at the corners. “Dan’er,” Wen returned. He turned Donnie’s hand upwards, and withdrew something from his pockets. As Donnie watched, he placed the tip of the cigar within the cutter. _Click_. Metal bit at metal. Heel tapped marble. Zhou Yun caught the cut end of the cigar before it dropped to the floor. Her head dipped down low, and she swept away to walk further into the suite. Her closed hand trapped the flakes of tobacco within, and left a clean floor behind.

A ritual was a series of actions repeated without need for there to be meaning attached to it. Donnie was glad such a thing existed; such a word existed. Blessed water that fell from the hand of the Goddess of Mercy, soaking into petals. Its power was meant to clean, to erase one of filth and sin.

Donnie parted his lips for Wen to place the cigar between them. He allowed his eyelids to fall, but they could not hide him from the familiar Zippo, the bottom-left corner engraved with the character of Wen’s surname. They could not hide him from Wen’s sharpening gaze, distorted by the shivering orange flames. He inhaled, and smoke slipped down his throat.

He cleaned every inch of his body. But the dirt had crawled far deeper within.

***

_Shanghai, 2002_

Tianzifang’s streets were narrow, buildings packed close together enough to cut off any breeze that could ease the wet heat. The mid-afternoon sun turned the shadows of the short and squat buildings into long slashes across the paved ground, almost tall and thin enough to resemble the skyscrapers of Hong Kong. Donnie held the map tighter in his hands, paper crinkling between his fingers, and tried to not think too much about blood and a hallway just a shade narrower than this one.

The café he had been looking for had a blackboard at the front door and its menu written in pink chalk. There was a tiny cat drawn in the corner, wide-mouthed and fat-cheeked, and it had one paw raised in greeting. A talisman for bringing in fortune, traditionally Chinese in a way that belied the polished glass door and the silver-black coffee machines that lined one concrete wall.

A girl appeared at his elbow. Head dipped down, her chin touched her chest. “Mister,” she said, her voice a murmur that was nearly lost in the whirr of the machines. “He has been waiting.”

He followed her up a staircase lined with a rough red carpet that failed to muffle the squeak of the wooden floorboards beneath. Here, the wall was made of wood, too; solid and dull-sounding when he knocked on it. More than just plywood with a veneer; expensive ebony that contrasted sharply with the still-clear memory of the concrete wall on the first floor. 

Photographs stood out like glimmers of bright light in the wood’s darkness: one of Suzhou’s famous Tongli water town, another of its Master of the Nets Garden, a bird’s eye view of the buildings along the Bund, the entrance of the Massacre Memorial in Nanjing, and— Donnie stopped walking, and stared.

Monochrome with its sides and rooftop half-faded into the grey sky that loomed behind, the Yasukuni Shrine of Tokyo was captured within an ebony frame. Donnie raised a hand, fingers hovering over the glass before skittering over it, careful to not leave any marks. He swallowed the lump in his throat. There was no one in the photograph, only the building itself, framed by its _torii_ gates. The only human being was out of sight, hidden behind the camera, cut off by the frame.

“This way, mister,” the girl said. Donnie shook his head, hard, dislodging his thoughts before he turned around. She had bowed at the waist, her eyes fixed upon the floor with her hands spread out towards a still-shut sliding door. When Donnie approached, she slotted her fingers into the edge of the wood, and pushed it open.

“They’re planning for this place to become another tourism spot.” The last time he had heard this voice was but a week ago, but the crackling static of the phone line had blunted its sheer power. “Let the foreigners walk through the streets, passing all of the residences. Peering through the windows like you would the bars of monkey cages in the zoo.”

Out of the corner of his eyes, Donnie watched as the girl retreated. Her footsteps echoed in the hallway as she headed back down the stairs, and he used its shaky steadiness to regulate his footsteps. But his breath tripped again when dark eyes lifted. Caught in that gaze, he barely noticed the other person in the room, and so he jerked when another voice rang out.

“I’ll see you then, da-ge.” A baritone voice, gravel-like as well but somehow lighter than Wen’s. A head of curls that dipped downwards in half a bow. The man wore round sunglasses that sat upon a very familiar looking nose. His eyes were the same shape as Wen’s when he glanced at Donnie above the thin frames.

Donnie knew this man; knew his name, at the very least. Jiang Wu; famed as both actor and director. Just last year, he had made a film that had sent ripples so strong that they could even be felt far south of the East China Sea, especially when the creator wasn’t punished for it. A film about Chinese villagers who were neither brave nor faultless; a film with Japanese soldiers who were not monsters. A film about a war that Donnie knew only from textbooks; a war that had touched his family and swept away so many that there remained too few throats left for the stories to be told. 

_Devils on the Doorstep_ , he remembered the film’s name to be. Jiang Wu met his eyes for a moment, and there was a furrow between his brows. Donnie did not smile at him, did not turn to watch him go. He did not ask if the title was inspired by the man in front of him; by this devil who was born into his household. The door closed behind him.

Taking a steadying breath, Donnie recalled the expensive ebony tucked into corners with concrete to show the world; a lucky cat drawn in chalk to welcome guests into a clearly Western café; a photograph of a shrine at the top of the staircase, the strangest denouement to the famous tourism spots of Jiangsu that Donnie had ever seen.

“How was filming?” Wen asked as Donnie approached the table. He was wearing a turquoise dress shirt with a collar like a changshan, and the sleeves were folded up as he picked up the tea pot to pour into an empty cup that was obviously waiting for Donnie.

“Pretty fun,” he said. “It was good to work with Lian Jie again.” He sat down in the seat vacated by Wen’s brother, and picked up the cup. The tea was sharp and bitter on the tongue: tie guan yin; another incongruity in this Western-styled café. When he lifted his eyes, he saw that Wen had crossed his arms on top of the table, and was leaning on them.

“You have been working hard,” he said. “Your career is picking up again.”

“Only because I’ve had help from people willing to give me a chance,” Donnie said. It wasn’t entirely humility: he knew well enough that effort meant very little if there was no one to give him anything to work hard _at_.

Wen made a soft sound at the base of his throat, easily mistaken for acquiescence by someone who thought him a simple enough man for such a thing. He pushed away from the table. His feet nudged against Donnie’s ankles as he leaned back, and his eyes were narrowed. Donnie put his teacup down.

“There are chances I can take in America,” Donnie said, voice soft. His fingers ran over the rim of the teacup. White porcelain with tiny, cute cats painted in blue; the colours a perfect facsimile to Ming-era ceramic. “Lessons I can learn, too.”

“A new place,” Wen said. The cup filled again. Steam curled from the mouth of the teapot’s spout even as Wen placed it back down. “A new beginning. Is that what you’re going for?”

Donnie shrugged. “There’s only so much that I can do in Hong Kong,” he said. He lifted his eyes, and shook his head. “And before you offer, I have no interest in working in the mainland.”

To his surprise, Wen laughed instead of being insulted like Donnie had half-feared he would be. (He had never been afraid of Wen, not really. Smoke-tinged breath still lingered on the curve of his ear, and his eyes were at times blinded enough by it to see the hints of sweetness in those knife-edged smiles that Wen gave him. Besides, Donnie had never considered himself a wise man.

A wise man would not have met Wen in that jail cell with his knuckles stained with blood.)

“There are films that I can get you roles in,” Wen said. He picked up the cigarette pack at his elbow, drawing one stick out with his teeth and lighting it up. “But I don’t think you’ll be much interested in them.”

“Films like those your brother makes?” Donnie asked, cocking his head to the side.

Smoke puffed out between thin lips. Yellow-stained nails closed over the filter of the cigarette, drawing them away from that wide smile. “Try again,” he said.

A furrow on the brows. Familiar thin lips framed by falls of curly hair. _Silent_ , the press had called Jiang Wu. Like a warrior of those wuxia films that he rarely starred in. _Quiet_ , preferring to keep his head down and letting his art speak for himself. 

Donnie smiled. He plucked the cigarette out of Wen’s mouth, bringing it to his own. “Films like those _you_ make,” he corrected himself, and smiled with bitter tobacco weighing on his tongue.

“Clever,” Wen said. On his lips, the word was not praise, but fact. His fingers – calluses faded away now, after five years when the blades in his eyes were too sharp for him to need the same to rest upon his palms – reached out to graze over Donnie’s jaw. Donnie lidded his eyes, sucking in a drag of smoke. He let it out when Wen trailed his fingertips down to rest on top of the hollow of his throat. He waited.

“When you’re in Los Angeles, call me.” The scrape of his chair’s leg upon the wooden floorboards solidified smoke into an order. “I’ll give you an address. Go there, and mention my name. They’ll take care of you.”

Tipping his head upwards, Donnie quirked a brow. “Do you have contacts in America, too?”

“Only a few,” Wen said. He took the cigarette from between Donnie’s lips, took a deep drag himself, and blew the smoke out to waft over Donnie’s cheeks. “Favours I can call in.”

 _You’d do that for me?_ Donnie wanted to ask. But he already knew the answer: it was in the darkness of those eyes, pupils almost entirely swallowing up the brown irises; in the fingers brushing over the line of his jaw, nail scraping over his skin in a manner that could almost be said to be tender. It was in the echoes of Wen’s voice, saying _whim_ but meaning something else entirely. Something neither of them had ever put into words in the five years that had passed since Wen dug him out of debt with his own hands.

His eyes fell shut when fingers brushed over his lids. Donnie breathed out, long and slow. At the edge of his hearing, there were voices: Mandarin shaped like Beijing, like Wen’s, followed by that girl’s soft, slurring syllables, like and unlike his own. Footsteps fading away.

Wen pulled away, but his hand lingered on Donnie’s elbow. He knew his cue by now: he stood, rocking back and forth between his heels and the balls of his feet. He heard the quiet sizzle of the cigarette butt hitting the wet ashtray before Wen’s hands cupped his face. He tilted his head to meet the kiss.

The claim. Donnie tried to hold onto the memories of those awkward first kisses, but Wen’s tongue swept over his teeth and palate now, and dislodged the grip of sweetness in his mouth to replace it with the ink of his mark. Donnie arched against the broad chest and thick arms bracketing him just in time: only his shoulders touched the table as he was slammed down against it, making the teacups rattle. Beijing-accented Mandarin came again, louder now, yells instead of conversation, but he ignored it as he swung his leg over Wen’s hips and dragged him close, dragged him _in_. 

Five years since he had first whored himself out for the sake of repaying debts. Wen had never named a price for every claim, every taking, but Donnie had calculated the numbers in his head, and they had always come up short. There would be no repaying his debt in full like this; not when he shuddered with pleasure instead of shame as Wen’s wide hand stroked down his sides; not when he gasped with inviting need instead of tortured want as Wen’s cock ground against his own through four layers of cloth.

Maybe in America, under the roof of those who would know exactly what he was even if he didn’t tell them, he would. Maybe there, under different eyes, he would finally be able to repay his debts even as they grew higher and higher. But he doubted it.

Fading voices. A single pair of footsteps grew louder. Donnie turned his head, burying his face into Wen’s shoulder as a hand thumbed open the button of his jeans. The rasp of the zip lowering in the space between one step and the next. His own voice rang out, choked but so loud in the quiet room, as Wen’s hand curled around his cock, rubbing at the base through the rough cotton of his boxers.

“You can afford silk by now,” Wen murmured into his ear. “Or have you been waiting for me to buy it for you?”

Laughter bubbled out of him. Donnie sank his heels into Wen’s back, rocking up towards the hand. He heard the slide of the door opening as he scraped his teeth over the curve of one still-clothed shoulder; heard a softer gasp twine in with his own as he said, “You prefer to have reminders.”

“With something this crude?” Wen sounded amused. His eyes weren’t on Donnie anymore, but at the doorway. A moment of silence that Donnie fought hard to not break as a thumb slipped into the slit of his cock through his underwear. Then the door closed, and Wen’s lips returned to his temple. “Do you think that badly of my memory?”

“No,” Donnie shook his head. He jerked his hips upwards hard as fingertips danced down the length of his erection, biting back a cry. “But I know you like your reminders.”

“Wrong,” Wen laughed, and proved himself an idle liar when he turned his head and sunk his teeth into Donnie’s neck, right above where a shirt’s collar would cover the bruise. Donnie jerked in his arms, a piece of metal electrified by lighting shooting through it, and he squeezed his eyes shut and didn’t turn to the side when Wen’s hand finally slipped beneath his underwear and gripped him tight.

Throwing his arm around Wen’s neck, he lifted himself above the table, thrusting up into Wen’s fist. Wen’s hand stroked faster, harder, the wet sounds of him jerking Donnie off loud and obscene in the room. Donnie’s shoulder burned from the eyes on him, belonging to a body he refused to even glance at.

“Mine,” Wen said. Plain, matter-of-fact. A claim stamped on Donnie’s temple, his breath like ink to sink down into the blood to mark the insides of his veins. His shattered-shuddering exhale was breathed against Wen’s jaw as he scraped his dry lips over the rough hairs of his stubble, his beard. He came.

Then he was left panting, still curled up into Wen, face pressed into his neck. To breathe in his scent of smoke and sweat; to hide from those eyes that now burned into the spot between his shoulderblades; to have some sort of solid frame to pin his shivering form upon, he didn’t know. He couldn’t figure it out, at the moment.

Wen moved backwards. Donnie went with him until a clean hand nudged at him. His knees sent jarring shots of pain up his thighs as they slammed against the wooden floor. The spiking heat coiled around his crotch, making his exhausted cock twitch. He turned his half-lidded eyes up to see Wen’s smile. Soft at the edges, with a light that burned with almost enough affection enough to make his eyes sting.

Salt and bitterness below his nose. He turned his head. This cue he knew too, and he parted his lips to let wet, sticky fingers between his teeth. He closed his lips around them, sucking hard, letting his own come slide down his throat as his tongue laved over Wen’s skin. He chased the elusive taste beneath the bitter salt as he licked, as those fingertips prodded the back of his throat with enough force to make his eyes water.

“Come here,” Wen said. There was a click of a button sliding loose of its hole. The rasp of a zipper. A foot nudged against his thigh, but he was already rising up. A thumb stroked over the underside of his chin, almost light enough to be chucking him like a child, before sliding over his cheek. Donnie opened his mouth.

With that alien gaze still burning on his skin, he allowed Wen’s cock to slide down his throat. He closed his eyes when the fire behind them grew too hot for him to bear. Tears slipped down his cheeks as he splayed his hands on Wen’s thighs, steadying himself as that sticky hand slipped into his hair, gripping tight to the strands as Wen fucked his mouth.

He should feel shame. But he knew the cold weight of it far too well but now, and this twisting hollowness was far too warm for it. It was… it was as if Wen’s cock reached past his throat with every gentle, rocking thrust; had seated its heat beneath Donnie’s heart until his chest felt full enough to burst. Until there seemed that nothing _else_ could find its place here.

His jaw was starting to ache. Before he could make a single sound, Wen’s hand was already cupping it, lifting his head up. Donnie squeezed his eyes tighter shut, the sob building up in his throat shoved back down into his lungs as Wen thrust deep into his throat again, not nearly hard enough to make him choke.

Gentle, so gentle. Affection in dark eyes with pupils blown apart by want. A pair of eyes now burning against his hip, a few inches away from where he knew his cock was already starting to stir again with every taste of Wen that crawled over his tongue.

Shame would be easier to withstand that this nameless need. Shame would be easier to frame and understand than the shudder of pleasure he felt at the sound of Wen’s groan, at the twitch of muscles beneath his fingers as the hand in his hair held him still. Tears burned their way down his cheeks, dripping into the wiry curls that his nose was buried in. Wen came down his throat, a line of flame that had him trying to whine and cough at the same time. 

Wen pulled back. Donnie tilted his head back, eyes heavy-lidded as he panted with his lips still parted. He knew how he looked – Wen had forced him to look, once, fucking his mouth while in a hotel room where every wall was a mirror – and couldn’t help but shudder because those eyes were still there, the weight nearly burning through his skin down to his bones.

Fingers carding through his hair, tips soothing over the spots in the scalp that hurt from when Wen had gripped tight. Donnie squeezed his eyes shut again, shaking, as Wen bent down and licked the traces of his own come from Donnie’s lips. Footsteps. His hands clawed over those broad shoulders, at that broad chest, helpless, as Wen kissed him again. Tongue over every inch of his mouth, licking up their combined essences.

The clink of porcelain against porcelain. Something sharp at the edge of his nose. Donnie jerked, his head lolling to the side, cheek pressed against Wen’s knee. Something cold nudging against his lips, nearly enough to make him shiver from the chill that threatened to sink down to his bones.

“Open your eyes,” Wen said. Donnie didn’t want to. He could feel the gaze resting on his face; could feel the weight of that _presence_ barely an inch away from him. But Wen’s fingers were pressing over the curve of his cheeks, tips pressing down hard enough to put pressure on the bone. 

“Dan’er,” he said, and the curl of his accent around the second syllable was like the snap of a whip. Donnie’s eyes snapped open by trained reflex.

A woman was kneeling in front of him. Wide eyes made larger still by sweeps of eyeliner and shadow, full lips painted a sweet pink. There were no lines on her face, not even the barest of creases at the corners of her eyes. One of her hands were raised, fingers curled around a tiny, porcelain cup.

Baijiu, with an alcohol content strong enough for the scent to send his head spinning. Donnie’s eyes fixed on her even as his lips parted again for Wen’s thumb to run over his teeth.

“For you to wash out the taste,” Wen said, and he sounded rather amused. “You have a date after this, and you shouldn’t stink of come during it.”

What? Donnie blinked.

“You have been working so hard, Dan’er,” Wen said, voice as soft and gentle as the hand slowly stroking through his hair. “But there are still some things you need help with, even if you’re going to America.”

 _But you just claimed me as yours_ , Donnie thought. His throat would not work. He could only stare, wide-eyed, as the woman pressed the rim of the baijiu cup against his lips.

“I am Wong Si-si,” she said. Cantonese in Shanghai, sudden and shocking like electrified needles shoved underneath his skin. “My parents are friends of Mister Jiang.” 

“She has heard of you,” Wen said. There was a thread of amusement in his voice, nearly sweet in how it gentled the gravel-like rasp. “Seen some of your films, too.”

Her eyes were not lowered like the girl who had brought him up these stairs, barely an hour and an eternity ago. She met his gaze squarely, and there was a hint of a smile on her lips. When he blinked, she tilted her wrist. Cool alcohol slipped down his throat, easier and lighter than Wen’s fire.

Donnie closed his eyes so he did not ask: _Did he force you to do this? Are you here to pay a debt, like I am_? He did not want to know the answer. He did not want anyone else to know that he was lying when he spoke of debt; that the pleasure shuddering down his spine when Wen’s still-rough fingers rubbed his nape had nothing to do with compensation.

After a moment of his silence, Si-si rocked back on her heels. She made to stand, but abruptly sat back down. The sound of her knees and shins hitting the wooden floor echoed and echoed in the quiet room. She lowered her eyes.

Wen’s hand at his chin, tilting his face up. Eyes burning with dark fire met his own, and Donnie’s breath hitched. Wen’s thumb sliding over his lips, nail scraping over the swollen, oversensitive skin.

“Even if you marry her,” Wen said, “you’ll still be mine.” His gaze flickered to the side. “She knows that.”

“Yes,” Si-si said, in Mandarin. Her voice was steady in ways Donnie could never manage around Wen. “I know.”

“Her great-grandfather made his fortune from the opium trade,” Wen said. His breath ghosted over Donnie’s hair before his lips, dry and soft, pressed against his temple. “She knows well enough how things like these go.” The hand in his hair moved downwards, nails scraping over his spine. “You know, too.”

He did. “It won’t be a very good date,” he said, voice soft.

“Why wouldn’t it?” Wen’s chuckle breezed through his hair, warming the skin and wetting the already-filthy strands. “A first date in one of the famous cafes in Tianzifang, one of her favourite districts in her hometown of Shanghai.” From beneath his heavy lids, Donnie watched as Si-si smiled, her head bowing down. A few strands of her long hair fell from his shoulder to curl in the air. Like smoke.

“It will be a good story to tell in the future,” Donnie said, because every good actor knew his cue.

“Yes,” Si-si said again. She tucked the loose strands behind her ear, and her eyes were dark and knowing as she smiled. “It will.” She reached out a hand towards him, and let it hover in the air.

Donnie looked at it. Then he folded his own fingers over hers, and lifted it. He kissed her knuckles with a mouth still coated with traces of Wen’s come and sweat and skin.

“A pleasure to meet you,” he murmured.

Wen’s thigh, solid under his cheek. Behind his eyes, a set of scales. Another weight, immeasurably heavy, placed on the side facing away from him. Si-si’s smile, sweetness turned to knife edges at the corners.

He liked her already.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zhou-shi: 周氏. The second character is usually translated as ‘Lady,’ but that's just convention. It's real meaning just means ‘person who belongs to this family/clan,’ and are most frequently used to refer to legitimate wives of famous historical figures. For example, Cao Cao's wife was referred to as 'Bian-shi' before she became the Empress Dowager when her son Cao Pi forced the Emperor to abdicate.
> 
> Tsz Shan Monastery in Hong Kong, the Hilton in Beijing, and Tianzifang in Shanghai are real places. For the first two, I used Google. For the third, I was just there in June. Donnie did actually recommend the Hilton to Vin Diesel; Diesel mentioned it in some Instagram post that I can't find right now.
> 
> The second scene about the Buddhist temple, and about the Goddess of Mercy/Guan Yin, is as accurate as I can make it from my memories of hundreds of visits to Buddhist temples. _Qiuqian_ sticks are for fortune-telling, and the words on them are from Chinese poetry that serve as references and guides to events in your life. _Jiaobei_ blocks are for 'yes/no' answers, and are frequently found at home and used after giving offerings: a 'yes' answer means that the offerings can be kept (and the living humans can have lunch, now.)
> 
> Tongli and the Master of the Nets Garden both exist in Suzhou, and are places that showcase the Ming dynasty. Shanghai's Bund is the main hub that made it famous as a city centre in modern times. Nanjing Memorial is for the victims of the Massacre that happened during WW2. Yasukuni Shrine is a shrine for soldiers who died in WW2, including those involved in the Massacre. Go back to read that description; I made the symbolism regarding Jiang Wen's characterisation clear enough, I think.
> 
> Lian Jie is Jet Li, and the movie Donnie mentioned to be working in is _Hero_.
> 
> It gets even worse from here.


	3. 承受着满身疲惫, “with our bodies full of scars”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 你和我都是孤独的鬼  
> You and I are both lonely ghosts  
> 承受着满身疲惫  
> With our bodies full of scars.  
> 也许有天我们流出眼泪  
> Maybe one day the tears will come,  
> 那样子十分狼狈  
> Leaving us looking pathetic and wild.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings:** Intense mindfuckery, involving unhealthy possessiveness to a degree in which Wen refuses to allow Donnie to think of anything without remembering him. Depiction of Donnie succumbing to that kind of conditioning. Implications of backdoor political manoeuvring and manipulations. Dubiously consensual public sex. Once more: everyone in this fic in problematic.

_Hong Kong, 2005_

Victoria Harbour in the late morning spread itself out beneath the penthouse’s ceiling-to-floor window. A little distance away, two double-decker buses had just stopped. People as small as ants were crawling out, their hands clutching cameras as they milled around. The first person who exited carried a flag emblazoned with a logo too small to be seen. The green cloth fluttered in the soft breeze, the colour too neon and artificial to succeed in pretending to be a leaf.

It was early enough in the year that the glass felt cold when Donnie leaned his forehead against it. The chattering of the tourists below was lost to him – he was too high up, and the glass was very thick. All he could hear was the quiet whirring of the air-conditioning. There was no one else in the house; Si-si had brought Jasmine out. To let her see the place where she would grow up, his wife had said, but there was a particular edge to her smile that served well enough as a warning.

The apartment was too large for him to hear the mechanical beeps and clicks of the door unlocking and opening, but he knew the precise moment when Wen arrived. Donnie stayed where he was, hand splayed loose against the window and eyes closed, as he heard footsteps approach. He didn’t move, didn’t allow his breathing to hitch, as a pair of arms wrapped around him from behind.

“You’ve gotten yourself a nice place,” Wen said.

Despite himself, Donnie smiled. He tipped his head back, letting out a sigh as Wen’s mouth trailed kisses down his bared throat. A hand tugged his shirt out from the waistband of his pants as he said, “You picked it out for me.”

“According to your tastes,” Wen said. “So it’s still yours, entirely.”

 _That’s not how things work_. But Donnie had learned to silence those thoughts, now. Learned how to push away memories of numbers in his bank account, increasing every month and yet never seeming enough. 

Wen’s beard had grown out even more since the last time Donnie had seen him, nearly a year ago now. The roughness of it scraped against his skin, twisting shudders out from his spine. Or maybe that was from those fingertips trailing the lines of his ribs, so smooth now that he could feel the whorls of the prints on them if he concentrated.

“I didn’t think you’re the kind of man who would moisturise,” Donnie said. His forehead met the window with a soft _thunk_. When his eyes opened, he caught the flash of sunlight caught on the lenses of the cameras down below. Tourists taking pictures of buildings, all of them too far below to ever catch a sight of him. Of this.

“There are certain appearances that must be kept,” Wen told him. Donnie still could not see his face, but he could imagine the smile perfectly from where the curve was pressed against his shoulder. “Expectations to be met.” Teeth skimmed lightly over his skin. Wen’s fingers hooked over the soft, stretchy waistband of his pants, pulling back before letting go. The cloth smacked loud against his skin. “Even in a line of work such as mine.”

“Aren’t you,” his words tripped over themselves, and he lowered his head as a broad hand curled teasingly around his hardening cock through his workout sweats. A pleased noise echoed in his ear when Wen realised he hadn’t bothered to put on underwear. Donnie swallowed. “Aren’t you underestimating the power of your words?”

A chuckle right against his ear, low and deep, rumbling down the chest he could feel pressed against his back. Wen’s thumb rubbed at him, finding the head of his cock unerringly until Donnie had to choke back a sob, feeling the wetness of pre-come starting to soak through the cloth.

“I’m flattered that you think so highly of me,” Wen said. He pressed another kiss the curve of Donnie’s jaw, lingering there. “But there are some who are so set their ways that it’s up to me to make accommodations instead.”

Eight years now. Eight years since Wen had come to him in a run-down, blood-filthy apartment and dragged him out of the gutter his mistakes had sunk him deep into. Eight years since he had spoken to this man, received his name to hold like tiny precious gems in his shaking hands. Eight years since Donnie had learned that Wen liked to speak in riddles. There was a secret here, framed around those words, and he should…

Nails dug into the spot between his balls and his cock, and Donnie’s thoughts flew out of his head as he cried out. Wen’s arm around his waist dragged him back, stopping him from smashing his face into the glass, and Donnie trembled and trembled in his arms. Eight years, and Wen had learned his body so well.

“Do you want,” he gasped out. “Do you want to fuck me?”

Another laugh, softer this time, barely warm breath ghosting over his skin. “Such a filthy mouth from a man who refuses to film sex scenes,” Wen said, mirth so thick.

Donnie told the world that he refused to film such things because he respected his wife, and he didn’t want his daughter to have to grow up watching her father having sex with other women onscreen. It wasn’t a lie; just a half-truth. There was Wen, too; Wen with his fingers forming bruises on Donnie’s hip as he gripped him tight and shoved him against the window; Wen with his teeth on Donnie’s neck, grazing skin that was too close to the jaw to be easily covered by a collar. Wen’s marks on the marble floor under his feet. 

He had whored himself out for his career enough, surely.

“We can do that later,” Wen said, and it took Donnie a moment before he realised that it was an answer to his question. “We have time.” He sucked lightly on Donnie’s earlobe before letting out, laving his tongue over the curve even as his knuckles ground circles over Donnie’s twitching, aching cock. “You chose an accommodating woman, Dan’er.”

 _You chose her for me_ , Donnie said. But the words were stuck in his throat, because they weren’t true, not really. They weren’t _fair_. It was Wen who had introduced Si-si to him, but it was still Si-si’s choice to give him a second date after he fell asleep during their first due to the baijiu he had drank. There were no strings tugging him forward as he searched for a ring, as he sank down to one knee to propose to her. It was his own choice, and hers, too.

His hand clawed at the windows, scrabbling at the cool, smooth glass; holding onto nothing.

“Look at you,” Wen said. His arm left Donnie’s waist, hand splaying over his throat. Donnie tilted his head back. There, on the polished glass, he saw himself: lips wet and shining in the sunlight pouring in; his eyes dark enough to be swallowed up by the cool blue waters overlaying his reflection; his nipples peeking through his tight-thin tank top; the wet spot outlining his cock in his grey sweats. As he watched, his mouth grew slack as Wen nudged fingers against his lips, and he drew them inside and sucked, cheeks hollowing.

Wen behind him, face half-hidden by Donnie’s hair but his eyes still so sharp despite the faded reflection. Broad shoulders covered up by a suit jacket, white dress shirt stretched over the expanse of his barrel chest. His silk tie, tossed over one shoulder, the knot loosened enough for the first button of the shirt to be undone, exposing the column of his throat. Stark-smooth white and black in contrast with rough, creased skin.

“I prefer looking at you instead,” Donnie said, tipping his head further to let the fingers pop out from between his lips. The now-smooth tips glimmered underneath in the sunlight, bright enough to be caught by the glass. “You’re so much better to look at than me.”

“Such flattery,” Wen said, and his voice would almost be sweet if he wasn’t tugging Donnie’s sweats down. “I can almost believe in it.” If he wasn’t pressing two fingers inside him.

Donnie jerked forward, his elbows slamming against glass and making it rattle. They were thick fingers. They were barely wet. They scraped over his insides, just on this side of rough, on this side of pain.

“Ah, ahhh!” His own voice, ringing, filling this apartment that was his and not his. “Ah! Ah, Wen, ah!” Another twist, knuckles pressing against his rim, and Donnie’s cheek met the glass the fingertips slid-scratched over his prostate. “Ahh, pl—!” They pulled back, he dragged in air, and they slammed back in again, grinding _hard_. “AHH!”

Yesterday, he was filming. Watching, mostly. Simon on his knees in front of Sammo, pretending that the prop knife held above his hand by sticky fake-blood had actually sunk through skin and muscle and bone. Simon’s face twisting as high-pitched moans of pain escaped him. Sammo’s face, impassive. Donnie had watched and he…

His eyes snapped open as Wen’s hand wrapped around his cock, stroking hard and fast. Breath caught in his throat, unable to even speak. Yesterday, he had watched that scene and he had had to excuse himself. Had to rush into the toilets, shaky fingers pulling the lock closed before he was reaching into his pants, jerking off with the face now reflected in the glass seared to the back of his eyelids.

“Mine.” Wen’s cock like a line of flame against his thigh. Wen’s face, impassive. “ _Mine!_ ” Donnie dropped his head back, his hips shuddering.

“Yours,” he gasped out. Impossible to deny. Impossible, impossible. “Yours, yours, completely yours, please, please.” The sound of his voice, high-pitched. Twisting, twisting.

Teeth at the side of his throat, sinking in hard enough to pull the skin tight. He couldn’t breathe and he was coming, coming so hard that white flashes exploded in front of his eyes. Like sunlight caught on camera lenses. Fluorescent glinting off a false knife.

How could he be anything more than Wen’s property, when he had been so ruined?

Wetness on his cheeks. The same salt-drenched liquid that dripped upon the door of the cubicle after he had leaned against it, staring at the drips of his come on the linoleum floor. But then, there, he didn’t have this: lips slowly brushing over his skin, kissing away the tears. In the cubicle, his nails had scraped uselessly over plastic, but now they clenched over white, crumpling the pristine cloth as Wen turned him around and held him tight.

Hitches in his breath from tears, from the abyss where shame should be. Now air refused to sink into his lungs because the fingers inside him were still moving, every thrust leaving his lungs empty. Donnie heard his own voice again, those high-pitched gasping moans. His knees buckled, and there was only Wen’s arm around his waist to hold him up.

There was a metaphor, here. Something terribly fitting. But Donnie could no longer hold on to words, could no longer think. All there was left inside him were those broken sobs as Wen kept fucking him with his fingers, scraping over his oversensitive walls until he was trembling and trembling.

“Please,” he heard himself plead. The lightest brush over his prostate, and Donnie was crying out again, almost a scream as he pressed his face into Wen’s shoulder. The arm around him was like a band of iron, Wen’s chest like a wall. The fingers pushing inside him like a pin to hold him still.

The softest of kisses against his temple. “Dan’er,” Wen murmured, and in that voice, low and deep and steady…

It sounded more like Donnie’s true name, his only name, than any other that had been given to him.

“Hold on to me,” Wen said. Donnie nodded, but his arms were already obeying, wrapping around those shoulders. Fingers slipped out of him, and it should be a relief because his nerves were raw and his body was already aching, but a whine was dragging itself out of his lungs anyway, resonating around him.

Another kiss to his temple, then Wen was nudging at Donnie’s thighs. Donnie lifted himself even as Wen hoisted him up, and he was settled neatly with his legs wrapped around Wen’s hips, holding on tight. A soft chuckle wafted against his hair. 

Even in the half-haze his mind had sunk into, Donnie knew that when his daughter grew older, bigger, he would carry her exactly like this. He closed his eyes, and bit back another sob when Wen’s hand stroked down his back, smearing sticky, drying come all over his shirt. His fingers sank back inside, shallower this time, circling around his rim.

Just like that, Wen carried him to the master bedroom, and laid him down on the bed he shared with Si-si. The mattress sank beneath his weight like it always did. It creaked, quiet like always, as Wen climbed on to loom above him.

Trembling, Donnie reached up, carding his fingertips through the rough hairs of Wen’s beard. Wen tilted his head towards the touch, pressing another kiss to his palm. That look in his eyes was back again, obvious even through those heavy lids.

Wen had always looked at Donnie like he was the very reason he could continue to breathe.

It made something twist inside Donnie. Made him arch even more than those fingers sliding down his sides, following the creases between his hip and thigh, and pushing back inside him. They were nearly dry by now, but the pain that shot up his spine from both the scrape and the overstimulation seemed to matter less than the edges of the words under his tongue.

 _You could’ve had me before all this. You could’ve had me in ways far easier than this._ He brushed his hand over Wen’s hairline, turning his head to press his mouth against his bicep to stifle the sob that wanted to rise. _Why did you wait?_

Eight years since Wen had come to him. Fifteen, now, since they first met. Maybe it was meant to be this way, but Donnie didn’t want to believe in it.

Broad hand on his arm, pinning it back down onto the sheets. Donnie blinked upwards, and fingers skimmed over his skin before Wen cupped his face. He was smiling, lopsided, and the shine of his eyes had faded into a sharper, more manageable gleam.

“How has fatherhood been treating you?”

Donnie stilled. He parted his lips, but Wen was pressing his sticky, come-covered fingers into his mouth. He sucked them inside instead of speaking, his eyes still wide as he watched Wen lean over him and pull open one of the drawers on the nightstand. He didn’t need to look before he found the bottle of lube. The snap of the cap being open was loud in the room.

This apartment was still new. Wen had never been here before. Donnie remembered Si-si’s smile, the warning at the edge, and he could not find it within himself to be surprised.

The fingers slipped out of his mouth. Donnie closed his eyes as saliva mixed with come smeared over one cheek, then the other.

“You haven’t answered my question, Dan’er,” Wen said. His slicked fingers slipped inside him again, three this time, immediately angling for the spot inside that shoved breath out of his lungs. “Si-si can tell me what she witnessed, but she can’t tell me what you feel.”

“I,” Donnie started. He shifted on the bed, gasping, as four fingers pushed inside him, stretching him wide enough to burn. In his head, _your daughter_ rang and rang. His, only his. But she was both his and Si-si’s, not his alone. She was… 

Wen’s hands on his hips, lifting them up. A pillow, Si-si’s pillow, slipping beneath his ass. Donnie’s legs being folded back, his knees pressing against his chest, rubbing over his nipples. His spine arched away from the mattress, leaving only his shoulders and the back of his head touching the sheets, as Wen pushed inside him.

His hands clawed at his own thighs before Wen caught them. He felt cloth under his nails as Wen bottomed out, his belt buckle cold against the skin of Donnie’s ass. Fingertips trailing over Donnie’s cheeks. Warm solidity bracketing him as Wen’s elbow sank down into the bed. A sob wrenched out of Donnie’s throat as he pulled out, and rocked back in, inch by slow inch.

Too much, still too much. It had barely been minutes since he came, and his hole was still sensitive, nerves screaming as Wen’s cock rubbed against his walls. Donnie raised his arms to cover his face, but let them fall back to the side because he knew he shouldn’t, knew that Wen wanted to see him as he was overwhelmed, as he was pushed to the limits of his body.

“Tell me what it was like,” Wen said. His voice was calm, implacable. Like he was sitting in a boardroom instead of fucking Donnie into his marital bed. His hips were flush against Donnie’s ass, grinding the head of his cock against Donnie’s prostate with slow rolling motions. “I want to know, Dan’er. Please tell me.”

“I,” Donnie started again. As stars burst behind his eyes, he remembered when Si-si told him that she was pregnant. She had taken his hand and pressed it against her abdomen, and her smile had been so soft and sweet even as his eyes widened and he felt happiness swell in his chest in a way that made his ribs ache.

Wen’s mouth over his own, slanted. An inhale that jerked the air out of Donnie’s arms, leaving him too breathless to even cry out when Wen drew back and slammed in, sharp and fast. Donnie could feel his cock starting to fill again where it was lying against his thigh. He sobbed out loud when Wen tapped down the length, encouragingly sweet even as he made overworked nerves scream.

“Dan’er,” Wen said. His fingers wiped away the tears that were slipping down to stain the sheets. “Please tell me.”

He was trying. But his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, and all he could do was to cling onto Wen’s sleeves, trying to hold on as images of the hospital’s waiting room faded into the forefront of his mind, as Wen’s cock wrung pleasure out of his twitching hole. He could only sob, over and over, broken cries escaping him with every thrust, as his daughter’s newborn, red-scrunched face tied itself indelibly with Wen’s thumb smearing his pre-come over his foreskin.

“Please, please,” Donnie gasped out. Wasn’t he ruined enough already? Wasn’t it already clear that his life had been in tatters? That the hands that had stitched the pieces together, forming a brilliant tapestry, were Wen’s, and Wen’s alone?

On those clever fingers that were now wedging themselves inside his aching hole, stretching him open even more. Blunt nails scraping over his prostate right as Wen’s cockhead rubbed against it, and Donnie could not even put a name to the sound that twisted out of his raw throat.

“Do you know how much you mean to me?” Wen asked him. His usual calm had turned into ragged breaths that drove knives under Donnie’s skin, tips grazing over his nerves. “Do you know that I will do _anything_ to give you _everything_ you deserve?”

Donnie tried to shake his head. He tried to say, _I don’t need everything_. But Wen’s fingers slipped out of him. Both hands now on his face, smearing his skin with lube and pre-come from Wen’s cock and everything else. Wen’s mouth on his, claiming with a vicious swiftness that had Donnie twisting against the sheets, trying to get closer and pull away at the same time.

He wrapped his arms around Wen’s neck, holding onto him as air was driven out of his lungs with every faster, harder thrust. Wen’s cock laying his claim on the insides of his hole even as his tongue imprinted his taste over every inch of Donnie’s mouth. 

Fifteen years ago: in a dirty toilet of a squalid bar, Donnie with nothing to hold on to except stained walls, without even a name to bite down on. Ten years ago: in a jail cell, nothing but their eyes meeting, trying to hold onto a ghost. Eight years ago: with a name and Wen’s taste on his lips, and strings winding around him. Three years ago: in a café with walls of both ebony and bare concrete, on his knees with Wen’s hand in his hair. Now… Now in this apartment Wen had bought for him, a ring on his finger from a woman Wen had chosen for him.

Donnie turned his head and tried to mouth against Wen’s skin, _All I need is you. All I want is you. If I have you, I already have everything_. He tried to say, _There is nothing you have ever needed to give me_.

But Wen wouldn’t understand. So Donnie could only throw his head back, half-screaming and half-moaning, as Wen’s hands gripped tight enough to his hips to leave bruises, and fucked him like he was trying to prove something.

Wen drove in deep, his groan muffled in Donnie’s mouth. His come splattering his insides even as his hand squeezed Donnie’s cock, almost too tight for pleasure, and stroked him hard and fast. His softening cock ground against Donnie’s prostate. His teeth on Donnie’s neck, giving him another bruise to match the one on the other side.

Hot breath over his lips. Donnie came – “Wen!” – with Wen’s forehead resting against his own. Wen’s hands running over Donnie’s body, touching every inch as if he was trying to memorise the feel of him, at this moment when Donnie was undeniably his.

But: _I have been yours since the first time we met._ But: Donnie had long lost the ability to say any of those things.

He could only card his fingers over Wen’s hair, his fingers trembling, his whole body shaking like a leaf in a breeze. He could only arch up towards Wen’s kiss, parting his lips without need for prodding.

“Dan’er,” Wen breathed. “Dan’er, Dan’er.”

Donnie opened his eyes. Wen’s were closed, and he brushed his thumbs over those tremulous lids. “Yours,” he said, and kissed him.

There was nothing else he could say. Nothing else he could do.

***

_Beijing, 2017_

“They’re careful enough to make sure to install yellow lights everywhere here,” Wen said as he headed towards the bedroom that was – presumably – his room within the penthouse suite. “But that doesn’t stop me from thinking that it looks clinical.”

He stopped in front of the window. Unlike Donnie’s own room, several floors below, there was a window sill here, wide enough to fit a body. Wen tapped his foot against the floor just once, and then swung himself to fit. Donnie lowered his head and bowed his shoulders. He sank to the ground on his knees, and clasped his arms around his back.

White pants. Black shirt. Black tie. A visual representation of formality on his knees. Long years had accustomed Donnie to symbolism when it came to this man.

“It’s too clean,” Wen continued. He turned to look out of the window, lips thinned even as he sank a hand into Donnie’s hair. “Don’t you think so?”

Even though they had only started on this part a few years ago, Donnie learned quickly. He had not received permission to speak, and so he didn’t, eyes lowered and his breathing even. The fingers curled around his elbows did not twitch, no matter how much he wanted them to. The wood that made up the sill was very dark, and its polish gleamed under the light.

“Dirt adds a bit of character,” Wen said, musingly light. Out of the corner of Donnie’s eyes, he could see him leaning back against the wall, one leg drawn up so he could rest his wrist on top of his knee. “Or so people who are used to this would say.”

 _Aren’t you one of them?_ Donnie stilled his tongue, but his head still jerked upwards, and he could see in the flickering darkness of Wen’s eyes that he caught the unvoiced question. It wasn’t anything he didn’t expect: he had never been good at hiding anything from Wen.

“I haven’t forgotten what it was like,” Wen said. His hand slipped from Donnie’s hair to his chin, tipping his head upwards until their eyes met. “Why do you think I hold onto you so tightly, Dan’er? You’re the only one who has ever understood.” His thumb stroked over Donnie’s lip, scraping his thumb over the lines that defined his cupid’s bow. “Or have you forgotten, too?”

There were few things impossible to forget; things with the power to carve the memories of themselves into bones, leaving scars that ached with every other move. Donnie closed his eyes, and remembered the jostling of small bodies like his own as they fought to get a good view of the one grainy black-and-white television in the neighbourhood.

He shook his head. When Wen pressed his thumb deeper into his lip, until the nail scraped over his teeth through the thin layer of skin and muscle, he let out a long, shuddering breath.

“I haven’t,” he said. “But it’s hard to believe that you still remember.” 

“Why?” Wen cocked his head.

“This place,” Donnie said. He licked his lips just once, the tip of his tongue scraping over Wen’s nail, before he rolled his shoulders back to draw attention to the arms crossed behind his back. “This thing that you have asked me to do.”

“Don’t I deserve rewards for the hard work I’ve done throughout the years?” Wen asked, and the lilting mirth in his voice was blunt enough to not leave scars across Donnie’s skin. “Don’t I deserve to revel in the results of my efforts?”

Donnie’s lids fell shut as smooth fingertips brushed over them. He exhaled, shaky and tremulous. “What of me?” he whispered. “Am I supposed to be merely your reward, without any of my own?”

Wen’s hand stilled on his cheek. “You do not find this to be a reward, then?”

“You have me here, on my knees,” Donnie replied. He tipped his head back, letting Wen’s hand slide down until he could turn his head to press kisses along the silk-like palm. “What definition of reward are you using?”

Slowly, Wen prodded once more at his lips. Donnie opened his mouth by reflex, and sucked the fingers in, tasting salt and the lingering, plasticky oil of the moisturiser. “Yet you have never once refused me,” Wen said, his tone contemplative.

Letting the fingers fall once more from his mouth, Donnie nodded. “Yet I have never once refused you,” he agreed. His eyes lifted to meet Wen’s, taking in the soft creases that had folded themselves into being at the corners. “But maybe I am just so used to agreeing that I have forgotten what refusal means.”

“Mm,” Wen said. He shifted on the windowsill, legs swinging around Donnie’s head before his feet planted down on the floor on the either side of him. Both hands reached out, cupping Donnie’s face, fingertips sliding over his temple, skimming over the hairline where the roots had recently been dyed black. “What will you do, Dan’er, if I let you go?”

Shivering shadows in dark eyes. Wen did not mean right now; Wen did not mean simply this room. Donnie smiled as fingers closed around his throat, and his breath didn’t even hitch. “You have never once needed a collar to restrain me,” he said. “You never once needed to use _anything_.”

Nails scraped over the vulnerable skin of his throat. Donnie arched, his knees digging into the hard marble floor as his body surged towards the touch. “The first time you agreed to be mine,” Wen said, voice soft, “I saved you from ruin.”

“That was not the first time,” Donnie said. He had started counting the years again, and so now he knew that it had been twenty-seven since they had first met; twenty since Wen had come to him in that broken-down apartment with its floors and walls soaked with blood. “I had been yours even before that.”

“Before that,” Wen said, and there was a rare tripping rasp in his voice. “What do you mean, before that?”

Fingers trailed over his throat, following the same line he had taken when he had run the flowers over himself. He calculated that himself, Donnie knew, yet he could not help but smile, nonetheless, and tilted his head towards the hand, rubbing his cheek over the knuckles.

He was still afraid. But fear had always been so constant with this man that it was no more than a quiet buzz at the back of his mind; as easy to ignore as the ache in his knees and thighs.

“From the very first time your eyes turned towards me,” he said, and he knew his smile was crooked. “Do you remember what I said, the third time we met?” He lowered his lids again, and scraped his teeth over the tip of Wen’s finger before closing his lips around, sucking gently on his skin. 

Knuckles brushed over his cheek, following the line of the bone. “‘Why didn’t you ask this of me seven years ago?’” Wen quoted, his voice shaky and unsteady like it had never been before.

Flowers could be torn and scattered. Water would eventually flow away, or fade into nothingness. But the marks he and Wen had left on each other had stayed for twenty-seven years, now, and Donnie knew they could never be erased. Each touch, each word, only engraved them even deeper. Past the skin, past the bone, all the way down to the soul.

He closed his eyes. “I’ve always wanted to surprise you,” he said, voice soft. His nails were digging into his elbow, and his bad shoulder ached from the force. He shoved both sensations away to the corner of his mind. “I’m only sorry that it had taken so long.”

“Why,” Wen’s voice tripped once more in his throat. “Why have you never told me this before?”

Knees pressing against the ground, Donnie straightened. Without loosening his grip on his elbows, he drew his lips back, and scraped his teeth over one of Wen’s broadly-curved shoulders. He bit down on the muscle, and felt it tremble before he let go.

“You said it yourself,” he said. “Despite the yellow light, the room still looked clinical.” His lips caught the hitch of breath at the base of Wen’s throat. “We are so used to dirt that it has writ itself over the back of our eyes.”

There was no way that they could have understood each other twenty-seven years ago. No way they could have reached out and truly touched even twenty years ago. There were too many scars scored by desperate need, and their weakened fingers had been permanently curled by their scramble to hold onto pride and dignity as everything else fell apart around them.

For those like them, there were only two paths left to take. Wen sank deep into the shadows, dyeing his hands red with so much blood that they rejected the light. Donnie scrabbled at glass windows, breaking his nails, his own blood coating his hands as he frantically climbed upwards, again and again even as shadows nipped at his heels.

Only at the margins, where the edges of darkness touched the light, could they ever touch each other. Donnie closed his eyes, and buried his face into Wen’s neck as shaking fingers ran over his hair.

“I’ve always wanted to say that I have only ever needed you,” he continued. “But both of us knew that will only be a lie.”

“Perhaps I’ve had too much pride,” Wen said, his voice just as low. His lips pressed into Donnie’s hair as he bent over him. His hands slid down Donnie’s arms, but did not try to pry his fingers away from his elbows. “Perhaps it was my pride that has led us to this.”

Donnie closed his eyes. “You’ve known, then,” he said. Debts on a balancing scale. Wen’s darkness, wrapping around him tight enough to suffocate, creeping behind his eyes so he couldn’t stop seeing him even as he tried. Flowers and water far too weak to cleanse the trail left by shadows. 

“Dan’er,” Wen said, and there was a shuddering laugh caught in his throat. “I have always known.” His nail scraped over the curve of Donnie’s ear, moving down to the spot just beneath before he dug in, making him shudder and gasp. “But you have never once refused, and I don’t know what else I can do to have you.”

His finger nudged at Donnie’s chin. Donnie lifted his head, and their eyes met as Wen gave him a wry smile. “Perhaps,” he said. “We can try without you being on your knees.”

Tilting his head, Donnie laughed. “Didn’t we try this,” his shoulders shook, “because it was supposed to be between equals?”

Hands wrapping around his shoulders, the weight making his knees ache even as his breaths came easier to his lungs. Hands sliding down, nails scraping over the cloth of the blazer until Wen reached his wrists, and stayed there. “Yet you have never once refused me,” Wen said again, “and instead did even better than I have ever asked of you.”

 _Maybe we were meant to be like this_ , Donnie heard, the words woven in Wen’s warm breath over his temple. He nearly smiled, for the fear was still there, twined into his bones, and yet he could feel Wen’s own terror in the grip of those fingers on his arms. “I have never known you to be afraid,” he said. He brushed a kiss over Wen’s jaw, feeling the rasp of stubble over his skin. “I have never known you to hesitate, will wavering, before taking the leap.”

Wen’s fingers in his hair, skimming gently. “There’s a difference between jumping into the shadows with night-sharp eyes open,” he said, “and what you’re asking of me.”

Donnie leaned back, pulling slightly out of Wen’s grip so he could meet those strangely-lowered eyes. “What am I asking of you?”

A soft chuckle. Then silence, Wen’s hands falling back down to his sides until the only weight Donnie could feel was his gaze. Slowly, so slowly, he lifted his shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “You’re asking me to risk losing you,” he said.  
_  
_ “I don’t need a reason to want to be with you,” Donnie said.

Wen’s smile, crooked and wry. Wen’s hands, the knuckles brushing over Donnie’s cheek, his jaw, his lips, dragging-slow, inch by inch. “I don’t remember the last time anyone wished to stay,” he said, “without being given a reason they could not refuse.”

Of course. Pieces falling together, clanging bell-like in Donnie’s mind. _Of course_. For here was another consequence of being smeared by blood and shadows, of letting both sink into the muscles and nerves and bones and soul: the world reduced to transactions. Debts to be collected, debts to be repaid.

Nails peeled away from skin. Donnie smiled at Wen’s hitched breathing as his hands landed on those strong, muscular thighs. He leaned in, and skimmed his teeth over the cloth stretched over the knee. “Let me show you,” he breathed. He lifted his eyes. “I know I can’t convince you, but let me show you.”

Wen’s forehead touching his own. The warmth of his breath ghosting over Donnie’s skin. Donnie closed his eyes, and whispered, “Please.”

A hand cupped the back of his neck. The curve of a smile over his own lips, tremulous at the edges. Nails scraping down his spine, but the fire sparked did not burn him to the bones.

“Alright,” Wen said. His lips against Donnie’s eyelids, one after the other. “Alright. Show me.”

***

_Beijing, 2009_

“Mister Zhan, I’d like to introduce you to Mister Jiang Wen.” Donnie should remember this man’s name; assigned the duty of introductions, he was likely someone important here, on the mainland. Or the son of someone important. “Mister Jiang Wen is one of the producers of this film.”

Wen stood in front of him, tailored suit pristine in black and white, one of the various slices of monochrome amidst the casually-dressed actors who had all gathered here on the grounds of Zhongnanhai. Though he was far more broad-shouldered, and he hid the knives in his eyes and smiles far better than most of the other members of the Communist Party who roving around.

“He is a member of the Film Bureau,” the man who introduced them continued, seemingly oblivious to Donnie’s wide eyes or the lopsided curve of Wen’s lips. “From what I have heard from my seniors, Mister Zhan, Mister Jiang is a fan of yours.”

“That’s an understatement,” Wen said. He shifted the cigarette from his mouth to his fingers, blowing out smoke in a long trail that nearly brushed Donnie’s chest. “One of my conditions to agreeing to sponsor this film is that I get an introduction to you.” He held out a hand.

Donnie took it, still staring at him. When Wen’s hand took his, he stifled his shudder when he felt soft, smooth fingertips stroke over his knuckles. A trail of heat shot up from his wrist to his neck, skittering down his spine and spreading outwards. Donnie swallowed hard, and tried to focus on the sight of the Forbidden Palace in the background, its famed dull red roofs stark in contrast to Wen’s golden skin in the sun.

He could see the sky, here. He never could see the sky when Wen touched him like this. It should make him glad, shouldn’t it, for things being dragged out into the open like this? But instead… Instead all he could see were the knives hidden deep within Wen’s smile as he let his hand drop back to his side; the blades which cast long shadows that jutted out from beneath their feet.

“Please, leave us,” Wen was saying, turned towards the man whose name Donnie still couldn’t remember. “I’d like to speak to Mister Zhan alone.”

“Of course, Mister Jiang,” the man bowed. “If you have need of me, please ask for me from any one of my colleagues. I will be glad to serve.” He turned and walked away.

In the echoes of those footsteps, Donnie heard, repeated in his mind: _A member of the Film Bureau_. He heard: _One of the producers of this film_. He saw, in front of him, Wen’s body, half-turned towards the Forbidden Palace in the distance. Wen’s smile as he brought out a silver box from his pocket, snapping the top open to reveal cigarettes lying in a neat row. When Donnie took one with slightly shaking hands, Wen leaned forward.

The lighter he offered was no longer one of those cheap one-yuan types that could be found in a convenience store. It was a Zippo, with Wen’s surname engraved on the bottom-left corner. Donnie leaned in, and met Wen’s eyes through the shivering flame. Bitter smoke slid down his throat, smoother than any tobacco he had ever bought for himself.

 _There are certain appearances that must be kept,_ Wen had told him four years ago. _Expectations that must be met_. 

A newspaper article drifted across his mind: protests in Hong Kong being dismantled by groups of supposedly disparate hooligans whose accents could be traced back to Beijing. Another article: rumours of thugs in rural China being hired by the government to put down those who dared to dissent, or even those who tried to make use of their supposed rights to have free elections.

Wen clicked the lighter back shut, and slipped it along with the cigarette box into his pocket. He cocked his head to the side, and his smile widened. When he turned around, Donnie followed him. No one even looked at them as Wen led them right past two security guards whose presence delineated the parts of the grounds that those invited for _The Founding of a Republic_ were allowed to cross. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Donnie could catch a hint of Leon’s frown. There was also a flash of curls, half-familiar, that he refused to identify. Then Wen was leading him around the corner, and there was only the sunlight above them and the Forbidden Palace around them. Wen took one last drag from the cigarette in his hand, and then tossed it onto the ground. His leather shoe shone as he used it to grind the embers out. No one came to stop him. No one was watching. 

Donnie had known that Wen was climbing-clawing his way upwards, but he did not expect it to see the evidence here, terrifying and undeniable.

“Did you buy me this role?” he asked, voice soft. He told himself that he wouldn’t be angry if Wen did.

Shaking his head, Wen crossed his arms. “If I could have, I would’ve bought you _away_ from this role,” he said. “This film is utter rubbish.”

Donnie blinked. “What?”

“I didn’t put you into my protection by asking to be officially introduced to you, you know,” Wen said. There was just a hint of mirth at the corner of his mouth; or perhaps that was just the overly-bright sun distorting the shape of his lips. “I was actually putting myself under yours.”

Though he could hear himself say, “I don’t understand,” the pieces were already falling into place.

But Wen indulged him, nonetheless: “You have been making films that are nationalistic in the way that they,” he tipped his head away from the Forbidden Place, towards Zhongnanhai, “like.” His laugh was nothing more than a hoarse rasp. “I’m not lying when I said that I’m a fan of yours, either.”

Donnie was moving even before his mind could catch up. His own cigarette fell to the ground, and his elbow was against that familiar broad chest that he had leaned against so many times, and his lips were inches away from that mouth he knew exactly the taste of.

“Did you,” his voice was shaking, “say that I must get married just for _this_?”

Wen’s eyes met his own. He did not smile. But there was no guilt in his eyes, either. “It’s easier for people to assume that you are the symbol of nationalistic fervour when you’re married with children,” Wen told him. “So: half of it.” 

“What,” Donnie swallowed, ignored the prickling at the back of his eyes. “What’s the other half?”

“You deserve to have a family,” Wen said. His hand reached up, brushing light over the curve of Donnie’s jaw. “Don’t Si-si and your children make you happy?”

When his daughter flung herself at him to be held, all Donnie could think about was Wen. When his son was born and Donnie cradled him in his arms, all he could think about was Wen. When Si-si smiled at him with her hand cupping his cheek, all he could think about was Wen. When Wen wasn’t there with him, he could look at his family and remember, and it would just be like if he _was_.

“Just like you deserve not doing the films you don’t like,” Wen continued, voice soft. His hand cupped Donnie’s face, thumb running over the curve of his cheek. “You deserve having a filmography with only the works you can be proud of.”

The words he didn’t say four years ago: _All I need is you_. Donnie’s hands dropped, and clenched tight around the lapels of that black blazer. Silk beneath his fingers. He remembered that boy from so long ago, when Wen’s smile had still been soft and his knife in his pocket instead of between his teeth. He remembered that boy and his ragged t-shirt and worn jeans.

He dropped his head down to Wen’s shoulder, and said, “I like making those films.” Wen’s hand stilled on his cheek. “Those things you called rubbish… I like the stories.” He lifted his head, and his smile was crooked and broken, but he couldn’t offer anything better. Not even to this man. 

“They didn’t have to press-gang me into accepting this role, Wen,” he said, and did not try to smile. “The moment they asked, I agreed.” 

This close, he could feel the hitch of Wen’s breath where it was tripped in his lungs. Wen’s fingers were still gentle as they brushed a few strands of hair away from his face. “You mean that,” he said. Surprise made his voice tremble.

“I don’t need you to do any of that for me,” Donnie told him, sinking the knife in deep. “I don’t want you to do that for me.”

“ _Why_?” 

Donnie could tell him that he spent his teenage years in Boston, separated by an entire ocean from his homeland. He could tell him that he spent his childhood in Hong Kong during the heights of British colonisation, where Cantonese was spoken but only English had power. He could tell him that he had to learn what being Chinese meant, in ways that Wen, born and bred on the mainland, would never understand. He would have told him, if only Wen had asked.

But Wen had never asked. Not once. Even now, with his attention fixed on Donnie and the question hanging in the air, he still wasn’t asking. Not really.

“Those films might be nationalistic,” Donnie said, “but they are moral before that.” He reached up and cupped Wen’s face. His fingertips brushed over the lines at the sides of his eyes, and he leaned in until their foreheads touched.

“I like them because they let me pretend I am the person I want to be.”

Thugs dismantling protests. Thugs harassing villagers and dissenters. Shadows stretching from this man’s feet. A pair of hands once covered in calluses smoothed into silk-softness over the years. A rundown apartment in Hung Hom left behind, replaced by a penthouse suite near the summit of Victoria’s Peak.

All of these years, Donnie had never asked where all of Wen’s money had come from. There was no use: he had always known, and Wen’s answers would only settle on his skin the layer of filth that had always hovered around him.

His thumb brushed over Wen’s light brows, and trailed down to the lines at the edges of his eyes. He tried to smooth out the deeper twist at the corners of the mouth. This time, the knives were between Donnie’s teeth.

“They let me pretend to be the kind of person who can walk away from you.” 

Wen’s breath hitched. Then Donnie was being spun around. Slow, too slow, he could stop it. But he allowed himself to be shoved against the wall; allowed himself to be lifted off his feet as Wen grabbed his thighs. He parted his lips and tucked his teeth behind them as Wen’s mouth slammed against his own.

He kept his eyes open, and stared at the Forbidden Palace. He dragged his gaze sideways, and stared at the grey-tiled roofs of the office buildings of Zhongnanhai. His hands trembled as he lifted them up, carding through Wen’s short hair before he brushed his thumb over the curve of those ears. 

“Don’t do this for me,” he said, forcing the words through the heavy, twisting pants and Wen’s weight pressing against his chest. He looked into those dark eyes, brilliant underneath the wide open sky. “Please.” _Please let me continue pretending_. 

Eyes falling shut, Wen fell forward, touching their foreheads together. His hand cupped the back of Donnie’s neck. His nails sunk in, digging straight into the spaces between the knobs of the spine. Donnie jerked, his toes curling within his shoes as he gasped, hips thrusting against Wen’s.

“If I don’t do this,” Wen murmured into his hair, “will you still be mine?”

“Yes,” Donnie said. There was no need to think, no need to doubt. This he already knew: the imprint of _yours, yours, yours_ engraved on the inside of his own throat. His body marked throughout with Wen’s claims: teeth and nails and fingers and come and cock, any of them, all of them. “Yours.”

Fingers gripped tight to his hair. Wen’s mouth on his, claiming again even as he tugged hard enough to cause pain. Donnie arched, his gasp swallowed up by Wen’s mouth. The scent of smoke in his nose. Nothing but air beneath him, his entire weight resting on Wen alone. A rough tongue scraping over his palate, his teeth. Between his thighs, his cock was starting to fill. 

A hand snapped his belt open. He turned his head and buried his face into Wen’s shoulder, stifling his cries as much as he could when Wen’s hand slipped into his underwear and wrapped around his cock.

Bright sunlight above. Forbidden Palace on his right, Zhongnanhai on his left. Wen bracketing him with his body again, shielding him from sight with the broadness of his form. But no one was watching; no one would come here. No one would disturb a member of the Film Bureau during his private conversation with his favourite actor.

There was no tease. Nothing but the claim of Wen’s rough, dry hand rubbing against the sensitive skin of his cock. Pain sparking in his nerves even as Wen kissed him again, dragging his exhales out of his lungs, leaving him dizzied and aching. His hips jerked in Wen’s hand helplessly, and his moans turned into sobs that choked and suffocated him when Wen’s other hand pressed against his hole through his slacks and briefs.

His head slammed backwards, but Wen’s hand was there, shielding him from the wall. Donnie came into those stroking fingers, shuddering in Wen’s arms with his heels twitching and twisting in the air.

Donnie’s lips were already parted when Wen slipped his fingers between them. He cleaned up his own come, still trembling from both the orgasm and something else he dared not name. He kept his eyes closed even as he heard the click of a lighter, merely closing his teeth lightly around the filter of the cigarette given to him.

Concrete beneath Donnie’s feet as Wen set him back down. Wen’s fingers; gentle as he tucked Donnie’s cock back inside his underwear and zipped up his pants, leaving his shirt untucked and his belt unbuckled. Wen’s lips against his hairline.

“I won’t,” he said.

Opening his eyes, Donnie traces the corner of Wen’s mouth. He leaned up and kissed it. “Thank you,” he whispered, and allowed himself to fall forward to lean against Wen’s chest again.

When they returned to the gathering later, the back of Donnie’s collar was crumpled, pulled too low. Leon whispered a question about the streaks of red on his skin. Donnie looked into his worried eyes and did not tell him that it was deliberate; that he was showing off. 

Wen was across the field, but his eyes were still flames, hot enough to sear heat across the marks he had left, bright enough to leave shadows licking at Donnie’s ankles.

Donnie lied, “It’s sunburn,” and did not turn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the third scene: Zhongnanhai is situated right next to the Forbidden Palace, and it is the seat of power for the Chinese Communist Party. The American equivalent for it is the White House.


	4. 如果你愿意爱我的话, "if you are willing to love me"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 如果我带你回我北方的家  
> If I bring you to my northern home  
> 带你回忆过去的年华  
> To return you the memories of the past  
> 如果你愿意爱我的话  
> If you are willing to love me,  
> 那我们明天就出发  
> We can leave tomorrow.

_Beijing, 2010_

Winter in Beijing had dragged the heavy smog down from the skies to linger around the tops of the buildings. Donnie splayed his fingers upon the glass of the ceiling-to-floor window, watching a particular grey cloud as it was scattered into broken pieces by the rising wind. In the distance, he could see puffs of white rolling forward. 

So there wouldn’t be a thunderstorm, then. At most, there would only be a drizzle later in the evening; barely enough to cleanse the city’s filth from the buildings’ skins.

Footsteps. Donnie turned just in time to see thick, dark curls heading in his direction. He turned back to the window, and smiled at the half-faded reflection of himself.

“If you had some martial arts training, I’m sure they would’ve offered you Guan Yu instead of myself,” he said. 

Jiang Wu made a low noise in his throat, voice almost as deep as his brother’s but far lighter in sound. “Then you would be Qilan instead,” he said, and there was a wisp of a smile on his lips. “Given what we both know.”

Despite himself, Donnie laughed. “He doesn’t much resemble Liu Bei, though,” he said, laying out in full view the shadow between them that they had been skirting around for the past couple of weeks. “Or have there been even more rewrites of the script today?”

“Not that I know of,” Jiang Wu replied. He turned around, putting his back to the window and leaning against the glass. When he crossed his arms, his thin dress shirt stretched tighter over his broad shoulders and thick arms. If Donnie cocked his head to the side and lidded his eyes…

“Who would be Cao Cao in that story?” Jiang Wu asked. The room was empty except for them – the director and producers had excused themselves into a conference with the scriptwriters – but Jiang Wu’s voice was still barely above a whisper. Donnie approved; the silhouette they were speaking around wasn’t one who could be pinned down with loud voices and clarion-clear words, after all.

“He fits the character the most,” Donnie said. In front of him, Beijing loomed with its steel and glass buildings that reached up towards the skies; a different Beijing, Donnie was sure, than that which had wrapped its hands around Wen and gave him the knives he, years ago, had put between his teeth. “A pity, then, that he isn’t much for acting.”

The creases on the sides of Jiang Wu’s eyes deepened ever so slightly. His curls brushed over his cheeks as he laughed, his shoulders shaking with the sound. “That’d be pretty disturbing, wouldn’t it?” He cocked his head to the side. “An older brother convincing the younger to join his cause, while pretending to be strangers.”

Shadows at the corners of those eyes; shadows in the shape of badly-hidden mirth instead of deliberately exposed danger. Donnie’s fingers twitched for a cigarette even as pieces of a puzzle fell into place inside his mind. 

“But they are not strangers, are they?” he heard himself ask. “Guan Yu and Cao Cao, I mean.”

Chuffing underneath his breath, Jiang Wu shoved one hand into his pocket. The other he rubbed over his beard, the yellowed nail of his thumb scraping over the rough hair. “The script implies something else, yes,” he said. His gaze fell on Donnie, lingering. “Would you have preferred it, if my brother were standing in front of you now, instead of me?”

Donnie’s hands twitched for a cigarette again. His jaw ached. There was a term he heard, once: _Pavlovian response_. Like a well-trained dog. He barely repressed a smile as he shoved his hands into his pockets to hide them, and headed for the door.

Jiang Wu followed him as he headed for the stairwell leading up to the roof. Winter wind nipped at his skin in tandem with the creak of the rusty hinges as he opened the door, stepping out into the open. The railing at the edge was barely high enough for him to rest his elbows on as he stared out towards the city.

A click. Dark roller wheel and neon plastic body. One of those one-yuan lighters, and a bare cigarette pack peeking out from the top of Jiang Wu’s shirt pocket. Donnie found himself laughing even as he drew out his own cheap lighter and cigarettes, turning his back to the wind to drag smoke down his throat.

“Did he ask you to take this role?” The question had hovered on the tip of his tongue since he saw Jiang Wu’s name on the list of actors with whom he would be working with. 

“My brother does not ask,” Jiang Wu said. Smoke curled up from the burning orange embers at the end of his cigarette, and his smile was lopsidedly wide. “He offers instead.”

“Offers,” Donnie echoed. Jiang Wu spoke much like his brother did, with the meaning twined around the weight of breath instead of the shape of the word. But Donnie didn’t know this man well enough for instinctive understanding; had only flashes of curls in that café in Tianzifang, eight years ago now, and at Zhongnanhai, just last year. So he ran his tongue over the word, nudging at the edges. 

But the answer was already there, wasn’t it? Stuck there at the back of his throat where the salt always lingered: Wen would never have allowed his brother to play a character who spent most of the film trying to, in crude terms, get into Donnie’s character’s pants. He never would have offered.

Donnie turned back to the cityscape. Despite the pale clouds, the skies were still dark enough and the smog thick enough that the buildings’ edges seemed to fade into nothingness. The answer was already there, hidden within their names: Wen for words, for ink painstakingly painted upon paper; Wu for martial, for actions that carried out those words. He took a drag from his cigarette so as to hide a smile.

“You are a dutiful younger brother,” he said with his eyes on the shimmering threads wound around Jiang Wu’s form; threads that only he, tied with the same, could see.

Jiang Wu tossed his head back and laughed. “He makes things easier for me,” he said. “That, I think, goes against duty.”

More pieces fell into place. Rumours that had nudged at his hearing years ago; rumours that he had tried his best to ignore. He breathed out smoke and said, “So you weren’t banned from making films for seven years.” 

Taking another drag, Jiang Wu rested his elbows on the railing beside him. His eyes, Donnie noted, seemed fixed upon the white clouds roiling in the distance. “Words are difficult to come by,” he said, every word deliberately enunciated, “when your muse is a wide ocean away.”

Years when Jiang Wu, purportedly, never made a film. Years between _Devils on the Doorstep_ and _The Sun Also Rises_. Years that Donnie spent mostly in America, gaining bruises on his knuckles and skills under his belt. Years that he had spent alone, because Wen had never crossed the ocean; not even once. (For his feet were too rooted to the blood-wet mud at his feet, and the rust-red on his hands was stank strongly enough for even those who turned their faces away.)

“He has never invited me for any of it,” Donnie said. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth, and noticed that his fingers were trembling. Ash fell from the tip, scattering into the winds before it could even hit the ground. “Didn’t even mention any of it in front of me.”

“There is a line in the film that has just been made,” Jiang Wu said. He flicked his thumb over the filter of his own white stick; the ash fell onto the railing, and tumbled over the edge to trail down to the ground seventy storeys below. “About knees that were not made for grovelling.” 

_My knees don’t take well to grovelling._ His own words in that blood-drenched room, fifteen years ago now.

“A story about a man who would rather surround himself with death,” Jiang Wu took a drag from his cigarette, “than ever go on his knees.” 

Donnie’s breath, soaking into ink for Wen’s brush to draw the outline of a figure that was entirely himself. Made into reality by Jiang Wu’s body. Donnie’s hands were shaking, and he wished, more than ever, to know what all of it could _mean_.

He closed his eyes, but those were merely the despairing thoughts of a foolish man. He knew already. “He has never needed words for me to understand,” he said. He looked down at his hands. There were nicotine stains on his fingers, yellow tattooing itself to the skin after long years of constant smoking, but it couldn’t begin to mask the dull-dark red that was starting to gather, starting to drip. 

“How old was he?” he heard himself ask. “The first time he joined.”

Another chuckle. The deep voice sounded strange, half-familiar, and Donnie felt a chill on his back where there was no weight. There was an ache on his hip where it didn’t touch the railing.

“My brother offers, and does not tell,” Jiang Wu said. He took the last drag from his cigarette, and flicked the butt over the side of the building. It twisted in the air, a tiny strip of white amidst the endless grey, before the wind whipped it out of sight. “Besides, I think you know better than I do.”

A knife in the pocket; sweetness at the corners of a mouth. Wisps of hair that brushed over the soft edges of dark eyes. Smoke-tinged breath over his ear and the too-tight grip of an arm over his waist. A hand over his mouth to muffle his moans, the thumb unyieldingly gentle over his jaw.

_Seven years ago_ , Wen had told him once, at the start of a new lifetime, _there was nothing you needed that I could give. Seven years ago, there was nothing I could do to make you look at me, and only me_. 

“Twenty years ago,” he said. “Wasn’t it?”

Another click of the lighter, staccato the rumbling chuckle that was now more bitterness than mirth. Jiang Wu tipped his head up, and blew his smoke up to join the clouds. “When I was a child, I had already wanted to be an actor,” he said. “At that time… if you didn’t join the army, the fees for drama school were high, and my parents’ jobs didn’t pay nearly enough.”

Strips of white falling from fingers shadow-stained with blood. Donnie closed his eyes, but he could not shut off Jiang Wu’s voice as he continued. “He is a good son, and a good brother.”

“But,” he heard himself said. A lump in his throat. Donnie’s hands shook as he drew out another cigarette, and lit it. “But twenty years ago, you would’ve already graduated.”

“Yes,” Jiang Wu said. “I already had jobs lined up for me.” He slid a smile over to Donnie, downturned at the edges. _He doesn’t need me for an excuse anymore,_ Donnie heard, and perhaps that was merely imagination. “He had found another reason by then,” Jiang Wu continued.

Rows of letters inked on thin light grey paper flashed across his mind. Protests dispersed by thugs who systematically dismantled organisational efforts. Thugs slipping amongst farmers and factory workers, culling dissent. Thugs standing in front of the doors of political hopefuls, blocking them from stepping outside, from speaking. Wen in a sharply tailored suit, a member of the Film Bureau. The iron of blood rubbing his fingers and palms smooth of calluses. Wen’s eyes, looking at him like he was the reason to breathe.

The Forbidden City behind Wen’s back: _You deserve having a filmography with only the works you’re proud of._ Donnie’s own voice, tremulous: _Don’t do this for me_.

Ash fell from his cigarette, and scattered once more in the whipping wind. 

“Reasons,” Jiang Wu said, voice steady, “are not choices.”

Donnie pressed one nail against the bed of another, but the darkness hidden beneath the ivory-white was not flakes of ash. It was blood. It had always been. 

“No,” Jiang Wu said. There, the barest tremor in his voice. “I don’t think you would—”

“I understand,” Donnie interrupted him. He brought the cigarette one more time to his lips, but the sharp sting of heavy tobacco still wasn’t enough to clean out the salt that had embedded itself into the back of his throat. “But words mean less than actions.” He flashed a smile sideways without turning his head. “The quivering of the air means much less than the solidity of what I can see.”

_All I need is you._ Would it have made a difference, if he had said it twenty years ago? Or would he now be covered in blood, wet and dripping, instead of having half-real shadows clinging to his ankles? Donnie didn’t know. The years had stretched out too far behind him to grasp, much less make full-form.

Footsteps. The creak of the door opening, and the rattle of the frame as it closed. 

Donnie was alone. But he could still feel the chill of the wind on his back; the cold sneaking beneath his shirt to crawl up from his abdomen to trail his ribs. Half-breaths ghosting over his hair, his cheek. He looked out once more. 

The clouds overhead had parted enough to send sunshine down, catching on the dust hid within the weighted smog. Beijing, sprawled open and wide beneath his feet, was bright and glittering. A sight that would take anyone’s breath away.

But there was a shadow pressing over his back, and his lungs were already empty.

***

_Beijing, 2017_

Sparse, rough hairs scraped the insides of his thighs. Donnie lowered his head, burying his face into Wen’s short hair as fingers crawled up from beneath the hem of his shirt. His low, heavy breaths wetted those strands, making them gleam underneath the dim yellow light. His shoulders twitched as the cotton of his shirt slipped over them, moving down, down until the cloth pooled upon the sheets, black splayed on top of white, the last discarded remnant of his formality.

Lips over his throat. He dropped his head back, his nails scraping over Wen’s arm, scratch-rasping over the silk of shirt. Wen’s fingers sank into his hair now as his teeth worried at Donnie’s pulse point, the skin far too high up to be conveniently covered by the collar of a shirt. But it was winter, and scarves were common enough accessories, and the world and its eyes outside had always been shoved to the side whenever he was here with Wen—

“You said that you wanted to show me,” Wen murmured, his voice deep and rumbling in Donnie’s ear. 

Even now. Even though he shouldn’t, with all that he had asked for still hanging in the air between them. Donnie forced his eyes open, but his lips still trembled as he ran his thumb over the lines at the corners of Wen’s mouth; those lines that he had never grasped the chance to watch as they slowly faded in. Not with how long they usually spent apart.

Their foreheads touched. He sighed. “I did,” Donnie said, breathing the words over Wen’s skin. His fingers found the buttons of the white silk shirt, and he slipped them out of the holes before tugging that last piece of stubborn cloth off of Wen’s skin. “I promised, didn’t I?”

Wen’s fingers, gentle on his jaw. Wen’s smile, shivering at the edges in a way that sent tremors down to Donnie’s very bones. “You didn’t promise.” His voice was so soft. “You just said that you would show me.”

There was a difference there, as wide as the chasm between the two different paths they had taken to claw themselves out of desperate need; an abyss that Donnie knew the shape of but had never allowed himself to touch. He exhaled, long and slow, and pressed his forehead against Wen’s, leaning in so he could scrape his fingertips over the other man’s short hair.

“I promise to try,” he said, hedging because promises in the world of shadows were nothing but ropes that formed nooses to tie around throats. He might not have dived into the abyss like Wen had, but its darkness had swirled around his ankles enough for him to feel its texture. “To show you the best I can.”

A quiet hum at the base of his throat. Wen’s eyes met his for a moment more, searching, before his smile widened again. “Alright,” he said. Splayed, his hands trailed down Donnie’s side, nails neatly tucked away. “Show me then.” 

Then it was him who tipped his head back, who dropped back onto the bed with a _thump_ that mussed the sheets and rustled against loose pillowcases. Scrape of rough hairs against Donnie’s inner thighs as his muscles flexed and bunched underneath him. Donnie bit the inside of his lip and didn’t allow himself to rock forward. He kept his eyes on Wen even as he reached to the side, blindly searching for the nightstand.

They had done this in so many different rooms. He had seen the shine of Wen’s skin, sheened with sweat, under multitudes of light. But Wen was a creature of habit and familiarity in the brief forms that he allowed himself, so Donnie found the bottle of lube in the second nightstand drawer, as usual. Tucked, this time, underneath the book that detailed Beijing’s best sights.

In a London hotel, that book would have been a Bible. Donnie had spent his teenage years in America, but he didn’t allow himself to linger long on that particular thought. He must focus. _Focus_.

Wen’s eyes on him. Chilly air-conditioning brushing against his skin. Both familiar yet turned alien when mixed together, because they had never done it like this. The soft, wet feel of his own inner cheek pressed between his teeth. Sparks of pain used to steady his fingers as he poured the lube and wrapped his slick fingers around Wen’s cock. His lungs seizing as he spread his hand out around Wen’s chest, feeling his breaths shifting and twisting into shallower pants. 

“You’re afraid,” Wen said. His hands were still on Donnie’s hips, but the fingertips were pressed to skin instead of bone. “Even now, you’re still afraid.”

“I,” Donnie started. Words dried on his tongue as he felt the upward rocking of Wen’s hips, a jerk upwards when he twisted his hand over the head of the thick cock hardening between his fingers. He licked his lips and lowered his head, tearing his eyes away from that burning gaze. “It’s different, that’s all.”

It shouldn’t be so disturbing. There had been so many changes, life like rain that never ended, metamorphosing from drizzle to thunderstorm to sun-showers and everything in between. Donnie had long learned to adapt accordingly, growing used to the feel of water sluicing over his skin in various degrees.

“But we’ve never changed,” Wen said. Even without looking into his eyes, Wen knew what he was thinking. There had always been only one thing that Donnie had been able to hide from him. “Throughout all of it, you’ve kept me steady.”

Twenty-seven years. Donnie lifted his head. He stared at a point just an inch beside Wen’s eyes even as he leaned in. Wet fingers on Wen’s cheeks, his wrists trembling without fingers to bracket them as he bowed his back for a kiss. Light touches over his hips, following the curves of the bones beneath, even as Wen tilted his head and opened his mouth.

No tongue. No claim. Nothing to mark Donnie’s skin or insides. Just his breath, steadily nudging against the back of his throat, far too shallow for any form of force. Donnie squeezed his eyes shut, and his nails dug deep into Wen’s arms even as he darted out his tongue, cautiously sliding over Wen’s teeth.

What did it make him, that gentleness sent chills down his skin?

Another shift, and he lifted his mouth away from Wen’s. Stayed there, an inch separating their faces as his shoulders ached from holding himself up. He should be showing Wen that he would not leave, yet all he could do was wait. He shouldn’t be waiting and yet his mind was blank of anything else to do.

Twitch of fingers over his hips. Donnie’s breath shuddered out of him, and he lifted his head. Stray strands of hair he tossed out of his eyes, and his gaze settled onto Wen, slightly crooked. “I’m not sure how to do this,” he said. A light brush over the edge of Wen’s hairline, in an almost-exact mirror of how Wen would do this to him. “Have some patience with me?”

Humming, Wen said, “I’m used to waiting.” Seven years he waited. Then twenty more before Donnie found his courage.

Thumbs stroked over his hipbones. Donnie clenched his thighs, keeping his hips still instead of rocking towards that touch. His mind drifted to flowers, petals breaking as they followed the same lines. Waters seemingly flowing from a sacred symbol, made for cleansing. A ritual that had no meaning because he could not remove Wen’s marks from his skin.

He could not cleanse himself so they could renew, redo, everything. He closed his eyes as he slipped his hand down to the base of Wen’s cock, holding him steady even when he flexed his thighs, sinking his knees into the mattress as he lifted himself up. Darkness flashed into stars at the back of his eyes, threatening to form into images, even as he lowered himself down.

A familiar stretch and burn. A familiar _want_ , coiling low at the base of his belly, expanding and expanding until he heard himself gasping, air pushed out of his lungs by the ferocity of the transmogrified _need_. Donnie heard a whine wrenching itself out from between his gritted teeth, and he froze after he sank down entirely, Wen’s cock buried deep within. 

But those hands still remained gentle on his hips. But Wen wasn’t lifting him up, wasn’t _using_ him. Wasn’t forcing his way through without giving Donnie any quarter to protest, to _think_. “You promised to try to show me,” Wen’s voice, quiet and deep. His thumbs curving once more around the skin covering Donnie’s bones, too soft to etch anything.

“I did,” he said. He forced his eyes open. _Focus_ , he told himself, meeting Wen’s eyes, and tried not to take in the wryness of his smile. _Focus_ , he repeated, raising himself up and sinking down again, shifting by instinct so that his breath stuttered out of his throat at the shot of pleasure that crawled up his spine. _Focus, focus, focus._

This was what he wanted. This was what he wished for. Wen trusting him, Wen _listening_ to him. To show this man that he was all that he needed, especially now when Donnie could afford this beautiful, pristinely-clean room with his own money. Now that there was still debt between them but the numbers in Donnie’s bank account could more than cover those engraved rows that Wen had spent on him. Now…

His eyes fell back closed. His hand, splayed open on Wen’s chest, trembled as the fingertips curved in, nails scraping light on skin and thin-rough hairs. A ragged breath out of his throat, and Donnie shook his head.

“You wanted this,” Wen said. The tremor was back in his voice, the low growl not nearly enough to cover up the splintering cracks. “You _want_ this.”

“I did,” Donnie said again. “I want this, but it feels wrong.” He lifted his head, and the smile on his lips was nothing but a wry, broken twist. “Does that make sense?”

Wen’s hand left his hip, and caught his wrist. Fingertips dug between the thin, fragile bones, sending pain that fed the flames of desire between Donnie’s legs. He groaned, the sound long and harsh, as Wen pressed his lips to his knuckles. An obscenely gentle kiss. “I did too good a job, I see,” Wen murmured. His eyes like dark fire above Donnie’s pale skin. “I’ve ruined you too thoroughly.”

It wasn’t a question. It didn’t need to be one. The truth of the words showed through too clearly in the way his cock was hard but wasn’t twitching like it usually did when Wen surrounded him, engulfed him, and _devoured_ him. It was right there in the burning at the corners of his eyes, and the lowering of his head in defeat.

Two divergent paths out of desperate need. Twenty-seven years had passed, and they had held on so tightly that their bones had twisted in their efforts to not let go. What did it make him, that he wanted to stand beside Wen, and yet the merest hint of level ground set him trembling? 

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes falling shut. His shoulders bowed as the grip of his hands on Wen’s shoulders loosened, and he let out a long, low sigh. “You did.” Fingers flexing on his hips. Donnie smiled, and tilted his wrists so that his knuckles ran over Wen’s jaw. Laughter wrested out of him, leaving behind a space in his lungs that was hollow and aching.

Twenty years. Words kept behind his tongue because he did not know how to form the air that could give them voice. Later, much later: rituals, both his own and Wen’s; monastery and water and petals, the correct way of kneeling, forms of cleansing that weren’t and could never be strong enough to erase all of the marks they had left on each other. The marks that each breath had carved deeper and darker.

Even now, as he tried to focus, he could still see Wen’s face, framed by the Forbidden City on one side and Zhongnanhai on the other. He could see the blood on Wen’s hands, the blood on his own, and their bodies smeared by red that glimmered underneath both bare bulbs and chandeliers. He could see the shadows that dogged their heels, smearing filth on every inch of every room they had ever been in. 

Neither of them could ever be clean.

Cracking one eye open, Donnie blinked the sweat away. Wen was still looking at him, gaze dark and hollow, achingly familiar. He brushed his fingers over those lips before he straightened, bringing his hands over to press both against the fingers lingering on one hip.

“Go on, then,” he said, voice soft. “I promised to try.” _You made sure that I didn’t promise to succeed_. There was no need to voice them; the truly important things, after all, were always kept, hoarded, between their teeth.

Reaching up, Wen cupped his face with one hand. Their mouths crashed together, Wen’s teeth slicing his lips and flooding metal into his mouth. Wen’s other hand slammed against his shoulder. Donnie went down, hitting the mattress hard enough to make it squeak, and he gasped and arched as the suddenness of the motion _twisted_ Wen’s cock inside him. Stretching him wider, sending pain sparking, sparking.

His cock twitched. Donnie smiled despite himself, and wrapped his arms around Wen’s shoulders. He pulled him down, turned his head, and pressed his face into Wen’s shoulder. Parted his lips and smeared his blood all over Wen’s skin as Wen’s hands shifted back to his hips, and clenched tight enough to bruise the bones. 

It wasn’t anything as simple as being _used to it._ It wasn’t anything as simple as _a bad habit_. Perhaps it was long past time that he stopped looking for words.

Wen pulled out, and slammed back in. Donnie’s back arched, eyes flying open, unseeing. Nails on Wen’s back, raising welts as Wen fucked him hard into the mattress, holding him so tight that Donnie couldn’t even thrust back, could only let himself be bruised and used and _ruined_. He didn’t close his eyes, fixing his gaze on the mix of sweat and blood on Wen’s neck, dripping down with every thunderous beat of his pulse.

He came like he always did: holding onto Wen, with Wen’s name shuddering out of his throat, with his own blood mixed with Wen’s blood tattooed onto the insides of his mouth by Wen’s mouth claiming and claiming and _claiming_ all over again. Wen coming inside him, a rush of heat that seared and possessed and—

Wen’s breath in his hair. Donnie’s hand splayed over the back of his ribs, feeling his beating heart. Wondering if the beat would tattoo itself now over his palm. Laughing to himself, because surely, surely it already had.

Twenty years. Surrounded and engulfed and _devoured_ , and the marks had sunk in so deep that they could not be cleansed. All he could do now was revel in them, and to gather as many as he could.

Yet he felt his own lips part, and through his heaving pants he heard his own voice: “I’m working more in America nowadays.”

“I know,” Wen said. His hips rocked, and his softening cock nudged against Donnie’s oversensitive walls, shoving a gasp out of his lungs and making him twitch. His lips on Donnie’s temple, stretching to let him feel the sharpness of teeth. “I visited London last December.” 

The familiar frisson of terror down his spine. Wen pulled out of him, and his hands were so gentle on Donnie’s thighs. “There was a Chinese restaurant that overlooked a park, right?” Fingertips on the rim of Donnie’s hole, circling and circling to make him writhe. “A park with beautiful birds on the lake.”

“Yeah,” Donnie said. He spread his thighs wider, tilting his head back as the fear mixed with the want in his belly. “They were my favourite places, when I was there.”

Fingers slipped inside him again, curling up to rub at his prostate. Donnie twisted, a half-broken moan falling from between his lips. “Have you figured out that I know what you’re trying to do?” Wen asked. He sounded genuinely curious, and there was an odd lilt to his lips as he pushed himself forward, pressing his mouth to the edge of Donnie’s.

“Of course,” Donnie said. He thrust his hips downwards, his hole swallowing up Wen’s fingers as his heels dug into the mattress. His lashes were sweat-heavy, and he shook his head to dislodge them so he could fix his eyes on Wen. “I’ve figured out, too, that I will always come back to you.”

No matter how much he tried to run. No matter how he tried to turn his back. No matter how much he tried to change everything. This had always remained the same. The one constant familiarity in his life of whirling change. The solid ground beneath his feet that kept him steady as rain poured down on him and gales howled around him.

Wen tilted his head. Their lips brushed together, but the light touch still sent a flash of pained heat down Donnie’s spine from the split lip. “But you’ll still try to run,” Wen murmured. “But you’ll still try to leave.”

Opening his eyes, Donnie surged upwards with both hands cupping Wen’s face. “Yes,” he said, and smiled, lopsided and crooked. He tilted his head to kiss Wen properly, and Wen sighed. Though his hand was gentle on the back of his neck, his nails dug deep enough to press against the bone.

Here, between their lips: _If I don’t try to run, you won’t know how to hold me_.

***

_Hong Kong, 2013_

The valet smiled at him as he exited from the car.

In front of him, the automatic turnstile whirred, thick bristles at the bottom rustling against the tiled floor that gleamed in the slices of sunlight. Lips curving up in automatic reply, Donnie placed his car’s keys into the valet’s outstretched hand, and stepped into the turnstile, letting it take him into the condominium.

Another nod in reply the concierge’s greeting, and he walked on. He headed for the special elevator at the side, and placed his palm upon the sensor. It beeped, and the doors opened without a sound. He stepped inside, shoving his hands into his pockets. Blue glimmered at the edge of his vision, but he didn’t bother to turn to take a look at Victoria Harbour below. After so many years, the sight had dulled. 

Doors opened. Donnie blinked, his hand instinctively coming up to slam against the elevator frame. There, on the edge of his nose: the thick, coiling smell of burning tobacco. His breath hitched.

“Sorry.” Wen’s voice, coming from a distance away. Donnie stood frozen there, eyes fixed upon the blinds over the windows – he had left them open in the morning, hadn’t he? – but he could see Wen from the corner of his eye anyway. Wen standing there, leaning one shoulder against the door of Donnie’s bedroom, arms crossed and posture indolent.

“Would have told you I was coming down south,” Wen continued, and Donnie imagined him plucking the cigarette out of his mouth even as he kept his eyes fixed upon the tip of the IFC building in the distance. “But it was a bit of a sudden thing, this break of mine, and so I thought I would surprise you.”

Donnie should be used to this. Wen had been a constant presence in his life for so many years that he had given up counting. Even when he wasn’t there, he lingered, sheltered in the shadows cast in the apartment by the sun. Like this one: stretching outwards from the couch, as if reaching for the man who had lived within their margins for his entire life. The man who, even now, stretched out with threads on his fingers to twine them around Donnie’s ankles. Not dragging him downwards, but merely holding. Trapping.

Taking a breath, Donnie twitched his lips further upwards. “Si-si never allowed me to smoke in the apartment,” he said, light.

“She didn’t mention that,” Wen said. He took another drag. The ash at the tip of his cigarette clung stubbornly to the white stick before Wen drew out a small pouch from his pocket and allowed it to fall there. A few specks fell onto the ground, nonetheless, immediately swallowed up by the shining, broken-marble floor.

_What are you doing here_ , Donnie wanted to ask, wanted to demand. The day was weighing down on him even more, and his muscles ached from overuse. All he had wanted for the day was to return home, and perhaps lay his head upon his wife’s lap while his children clamoured over him to tell him of school and studies.

He stepped out of the elevator, and headed for the couch. The leather squeaked. He didn’t move as Wen approached, merely parting his lips at the touch of a filter against them. He dragged in an inhale at the Zippo’s click. Tobacco burned down his throat. Smoke trailed out of his mouth, winding into the still air of the apartment, sinking into the walls. He would be able to smell it for days.

“You know that I prefer cigars nowadays,” he said.

Wen’s body was warm as he settled next to him. He didn’t speak, merely tucked his own cigarette to the side. His hand scraped over Donnie’s cheek, thumb running over the rough moustache that he had grown for his latest role. Lashes fluttering shut, Donnie tipped his head back. The skin of his throat trembled at the silk-smooth thumb that stroked down his windpipe. Pressure at the hollow. He tried to drag in air, but there was only smoke. His eyes stung and he was choking, suffocating, but he knew he shouldn’t move his hands.

They clenched by his sides anyway.

Then Wen pulled back. As Donnie watched, he tilted his head to the side, just enough for him to close his lips around the cigarettes. Stubbled cheeks hollowed, drawing attention to the shadows writ underneath those dark, piercing eyes, before fingers rested on Donnie’s jaw again. This time, he parted his lips, inhaling the smoke that curled over them.

“What is his name?”

Despite himself, Donnie stilled. He kept his eyes closed, but Wen’s breath was still ghosting over his skin, so he had to open them. He licked his lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.

Humming under his breath, Wen brushed his fingertips over Donnie’s temple, skimming over the hairline where, Donnie knew, the grey-white roots were already beginning to show. They had been young when they first met, his face clear of wrinkles and his eyebrows still black enough to pretend at some sort of thickness, but years had passed – he refused to count how many – but now it was mostly dye and eyebrow embroidery appointments that kept the fade away.

“Don’t do that,” Wen chided. His voice was even, twined only with the barest hint of a reprimand, but Donnie couldn’t help but shiver anyway. Wen had never needed violence or a loud voice to make his displeasure known. “The man who has been trying to smear filth over your name all over the press.” His hand cupped over the back of Donnie’s neck. Thumb running over the knobs of the spine there, dipping into the thin skin stretched between two of them.

“You know that I don’t have to ask to know.”

He knew. There was no way for him to not know. There was so much about his life that he had never told Wen, and yet Wen had always known. So much of him that he had tried to keep submerged in darkness, but Wen knew the night so much better. The brown of his eyes did not resemble the rust of dried blood, but there were echoes there still, in ways that Donnie could never put into words.

Eyes falling shut, he allowed himself to drop forward, his forehead pressing against Wen’s shoulder. “Don’t,” he said. His voice was trembling, but that was nothing new. Years, years, _years_ , uncounted now but weighing down on him nonetheless. Wen’s hand on the small of his back, searing through the bones that had mostly turned to ash, leaving only thin, shivering threads that could barely hold him together. “Please don’t.”

“Let me do this for you,” Wen murmured against his hair. His thumb stroked from Donnie’s neck down to the base of his spine, curving around his ass. “You don’t deserve to have to deal with this alone.”

Was it only three years ago that Donnie had found the strength to say: _I don’t need you to do any of that for me_? Was it only three years ago that his tongue could curl around the tremulous words: _They let me pretend I am the person I want to be._ It felt like a lifetime ago, so long that Donnie could no longer remember who it was that he had wanted to be.

“If you want to do something for me,” he said, “then please, don’t do anything.” His hands closed over Wen’s arms, clenching over his sleeves. Lips brushed over his hairline again, and Donnie’s eyes burned. “Let me deal with this by myself.”

“Why?”

The same question. The same tone. It was the same as three years ago. A man could only survive in the shadows if his eyes could adapt quickly enough, and if his body could learn well enough to flatten itself along the edges where the darkness crawled. Wen had adapted so well that he thrived, climbing and climbing up the mountains of bodies that his hands had pulled down, mountains that Donnie had never seen but knew exactly.

Yet he still could not, would not, learn this. He still would not listen to any of this.

“I want to deal with it myself,” he said. Unbidden, the memories returned to him: an accusation that he had made his driver kill another actor’s driver; insistent claims that he had stolen the director’s movie, snatched it right out of his hands; denunciations endlessly piling about how he was a bully, enforcing his will upon everyone around him.

The irony was enough to tear apart the bone-threads that barely kept his body together. Donnie squeezed his eyes shut. “Please let me deal with this myself.”

“There is no reason you should,” Wen said. “You have me.”

Donnie smiled, muscles aching with the twist. “That’s why I need to,” Donnie said. When Wen’s eyes narrowed, he splayed his hands over Wen’s shoulders. A light push, and Wen’s back hit the couch. Donnie rescued the cigarette before it could fall, and placed it between his lips. He took a drag, and then allowed it to fall and sear the broken-marble floors. 

Wen was everywhere already in this apartment. What was one mark more?

Then he reached out with a sigh, trailing his fingertips over the deep-creased lines on the sides of Wen’s eyes. Wen’s power had grown throughout the years, and along with it the signs of his age, down the edgings of grey at his brows. Sometimes, in the midst of sleep, Donnie imagined Jiang Wu – or even Si-si – telling him that Wen had died, outsmarted by someone younger, turned into nothing but a faceless corpse in someone else’s mountain.

Sometimes, he couldn’t tell whether those were nightmares, or if they were wishful dreams.

“How long will you keep me trapped within your protection?” he asked, head tilted to one side. “How long will you use me to make believe that all that you do is for my own good?”

Years since they started, years more since he formulated the words, and only now could he speak them aloud. But they had always been there, half-made and exchanged between their breaths like exhales of cigarette smoke inhaled deep into the lungs. Like tobacco, the words had settled deep inside.

Wen smiled, lopsided. There was white in his hair and creases around his eyes and mouth, but in that moment, he looked just like that half-grown boy in that bar so long ago. But his hand was still smooth on Donnie’s stubbled cheek, and his eyes were blade-sharp.

“You’ve never complained before,” Wen said.

“No,” Donnie returned. He couldn’t deny that. “But you know…” His fingers traced the air above Wen’s jaw, following the lines. “You’ve kept away so much that could make me afraid, wrapping your protection around me. And now…” His shoulders shook, and his back bowed as he leaned forward to touch his forehead to Wen’s.

“All that’s left for me to be afraid of is you.” 

Wen hummed under his breath, still unsurprised. He turned his head, and his cheek scraped against Donnie’s in a move that should be warm and reassuring but made him shudder instead. “Are you?”

Donnie squeezed his eyes shut, but the laugh wrenched out of him anyway, hollow and cold. “Yes,” he said. His fingers clenched around Wen’s shoulder, crinkling up further the pressed white shirt, identical to all those that he had seen him wear before. “I have always been.”

Lips brushed over his jaw, following the line downwards. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Wen asked. His hand on Donnie’s spine, nails digging into the space between the bones. “Because I don’t remember how to act around someone who isn’t afraid of me.” His body shook. “Not anymore.”

“Not even Yun?”

Halfway into sinking into his hair, Wen’s hand stilled. Donnie didn’t blame him: it had been nearly a decade since Wen had married, and Donnie had known of the woman’s existence and had even met her before, but he had never mentioned Zhou Yun when it was just the two of them; had never even allowed the thoughts of her to cross his mind. Wen, he knew, preferred to keep the different parts of his life separate.

Weight of a hand on his neck. A thumb tugging at the strands, nearly hard enough to rip them from the roots. “Not even my wife,” Wen said, voice soft. “She is sensible, in some ways.”

“Unlike me?”

“Dan’er,” Wen said. Like always, his tongue curled around the nickname in ways that set shivers crawling and clawing down Donnie’s spine. “There is no one like you. Not in the world.”

Those words should warm him. There was nothing like the regard of a powerful man; nothing like being seen by a pair of eyes to be unbearably unique. But Donnie had lived with the weight of Wen’s gaze for far too long; had felt the air thinning and thinning until his lungs heaved for air that wasn’t choked with the smoke exhaled from Wen’s mouth. 

He could only close his eyes. He could only swallow, and try to say, “Even if I am my own, I won’t stop being yours.”

Wen’s chuckles coiled around his hair, the thin wetness of them soaking into his strands. “Dan’er,” he said again, and his nails scraped Donnie’s shirt, right above the dip of his spine. “If you are your own, then there’s no reason for you to look at me, and only me.”

Here it was again, the weight draped around his shoulders, threatening to crush his lungs and throat. Donnie lifted his head. He fixed his gaze on Wen’s throat, at the thin skin that he could see fluttering gently with every beat of that strong, constant heart. Slowly, so slowly, he raised his hand, and lowered it.

Pale skin, white knuckles. Wen’s throat so fragile beneath his fingers, as fragile as any other man’s.

“You could have done this years ago,” Wen said. One of his hands rested on the couch. The back of the other stroked over Donnie’s cheek.

“I could have,” Donnie agreed. But he didn’t lean forward, didn’t even close his fingers tighter. “You have never been good at this part, right?”

There was something important that all of the movies he had been in were wrong about: strength and violent swiftness were rarely important amongst the triads, or even the police. Only in stories would Wen’s broad shoulders and heavy bones mean anything aside from what his parents had given him. Having skills to inflict violence was rarely important, because bodies – whether raw fists or fingers curled around triggers – were not hollow, and the nerves hidden beneath skin could too easily be tugged on by mind-woven threads. 

Wen had never needed to lift a finger to cause terror. 

Now, with a hand around his throat, he was smiling. His finger slid down Donnie’s cheek, skimming past his throat. “No,” he said, voice even and soft, without a single trace of fear in his eyes or hands. “Are you going to take advantage of that?”

Donnie’s hands didn’t shake. He knew he could have done this years ago. He knew exactly why he hadn’t; knew exactly what Wen was seeing in the depth of his own eyes. “No,” he said, and lifted his hands.

Once, years and a lifetime ago, he had imagined what it would be like if he and Wen had managed to come to an understanding earlier: if Donnie hadn’t been a coward and reached out to the man he recognised in that jail cell; if Wen had tried to make him stay in Beijing instead of leaving him alone back in that filthy cubicle. Once, faint images had lingered in his mind, mostly of looking at Wen’s smile, and feeling his touch, without having the tremors of his body imprinted into his bones. Of being able to look at something, anything, without the spectre of Wen hovering behind his eyelids.

Now he brushed his thumb over Wen’s lips, hand shaking at the slide of fingertips down his back. Now he drew out the pack of cigarettes from Wen’s pocket, plucking one stick out, and leaned in without thinking for Wen to light it for him. Now he looked at those dark eyes, and breathed out, wafting smoke over straight white teeth. It was twined with the last of his resistance. 

Wen’s hands cupped his face, and kissed him. He drew oxygen out of Donnie’s lungs with his next breath, and his chest rumbled with the “Dan’er” murmured over his lips. Tremors as infinite as years, seating themselves deep. Donnie closed his eyes, and allowed Wen to bring him to the kitchen; to the last room in this apartment still left unmarked, and allowed Wen to desecrate him in the place where he ate with his family.

That night, he woke to an empty bed. He rolled over to his side, and closed his eyes. The moon-cast shadows lingered, but he still waited for dawn’s arrival before he dragged himself into the shower. By the time he stepped out, he could hear the elevator’s doors opening, and the soft whispers of Si-si’s voice.

It took three days before Si-si left newspapers turned to a certain page on his desk. The papers said: a certain director was dead, the victim of a car accident near Mongkok, and the driver responsible had already been arrested. The papers said: the man was a native of the mainland, and there were no clues to explain why he was even in Hong Kong in the first place. The papers said: the accident took place on Wylie Road, near King’s Park at the intersection where a hospital and squatter villages used to stand.

The papers did not say, for they could not know: the director died in the place where Donnie had once lived with his family when they had first moved here from Guangdong. The papers did not say: the blood spilled on those roads had crawled over land and strip of sea to twine around Donnie’s hands.

Not that it mattered anyway. There was so much blood dripping from his fingers that a few more drops changed nothing.

Once, Donnie had felt the weight of debt across his shoulders, threatening to send him to his knees. He missed the lightness of those days.


	5. Epilogue: 看不到生命可悲, “they can’t see life’s laments”

_Hong Kong, 2016_

“I would have invited you to a cha chan teng so you can taste authentic Hong Kong cuisine,” she said. A finger between ceramic and wood; the cup landed gently on the table. “But, I thought, the risk of being recorded might be too great.”

Zhou Yun’s back was to her, both hands curled lightly around the doorframe. She did not turn, but simply arched her neck back, looking at Si-si over her shoulder. “A wise choice,” she said. A soft _click_ resounded in the enclosed room as wood kissed wood. “Though I’d like to visit a cha chan teng someday.” Her smile was sweet, and made sweeter so by the pink gloss over her plush lips. “Not just for the cuisine, but the atmosphere as well.”

Flashing a smile in the other woman’s direction, Si-si reached out. She curled her fingers around the handle of the teapot, and poured some into Zhou Yun’s cup. She kept her eyes lowered, deliberately not staring at the brilliant blue silk of Zhou Yun’s qipao, or the pale skin that showed through the long slit with every step she took as she approached.

She allowed herself to note, instead, the long black heel of the stiletto, and how the rubber tip and wooden sole made no sound when they touched the floor. She let herself calculate the angle of Zhou Yun’s wrist as she picked up the cup and brought it to her lips.

Living in marching shadows shaped girls into two kinds of women who could thrive in them: those who navigated through the darkness with grace, and those who reached out and twined their fingers around the liquid black, staining themselves entirely. And there were those, Si-si thought as bitter tea slipped down her throat, who knew how to do both, and switched around accordingly; those so rare that they defied description, and so could never earn their own category to be caged and allowed to exist.

Si-si knew her own limitations; knew which category she belonged to. She knew, too, just what Zhou Yun was.

They sat together in silence now, the wives of two men who had a relationship with each other that, if Si-si was polite, could be described as _poisonous_. There were questions on her tongue, words already crafted with politeness, but Si-si took another sip of her tea and washed all of them down.

No one knew anything about Zhou Yun except that she was born in Wenzhou, in the province of Zhejiang deep in the northern parts of China. It showed in the way she spoke, the tiny sideways-lilt of her accent. How she had met the man who had most of the shadows of Beijing and Shanghai – and hence most of the country – tangled in his hands, how she had gained his favour enough that he married her… that, still, was a mystery.

A mystery all the more miraculous given the darkness all of them lived in. Not one of them who had sunk in past their ankles could afford night-blindness, and so everyone scrabbled to find the thin shimmering threads of history. Si-si’s own background was well-known: her family’s wealth came from her great-grandfather’s hands, sunk deep into the blood-drenched darkness of Shanghai’s opium trade back in the early twentieth century. Though her grandfather and her father had done their best to drag them away at the cost of their own tearing skin and exposed bones, their efforts hadn’t been entirely successful. 

(She had agreed to this marriage. But her own acquiescence was nothing more than just another bartering chip, part of a trade that fed into a massive game that she would never be able to see.)

Her cup lowered back onto the table, landing silently again. Her eyes watched Zhou Yun’s for a moment, and though they were bright-dark in ways that were common enough, there was a depth in them that made her think that she did see. That she _could_.

“He has been taking a lot of overseas engagements, lately,” Zhou Yun said. There was no need for her to clarify who ‘he’ was. Si-si smiled.

“There had been chances, before.” After they had met, before she had married him. “But only now would the producers and directors see his worth.” She folded her fingers over the ceramic cup, and tilted her head to the side. “2008 was a good year.”

“It was,” Zhou Yun agreed easily. She lifted the teapot with a couple of fingers hooked over the handle. The liquid steamed, still hot, as it landed in Si-si’s cup without a drop wasted. “Have you encouraged him in those endeavours?”

“Despite his constant desire to bring me into his work,” Si-si said, careful to keep her voice level. “I rarely take a direct hand in those matters.”

Zhou Yun hummed under her breath. She slanted her eyes sideways, and pale fingers fiddled with the purse at her side. She drew out a black-lacquered box, and drew out one of those long, thin cigarettes with only her glossy lips. Her lighter’s flame flickered as she lit it up, and smoke curled like steam towards the ceiling.

It was illegal in Hong Kong to smoke inside buildings. Si-si shook her head, and kept her hands on the table.

“That is serendipitous indeed,” Zhou Yun continued, her voice barely more than a murmur. She plucked the cigarette from her mouth, setting her elbow on the table, and smiled. “Decades have passed since China opened itself to overseas trade, so it’s long past time for my husband to expand his businesses.”

Si-si’s breath tried to hitch. She had never asked him – she rarely needed to ask him – but she knew that Zi-dan had his eyes set upon the Western horizons because, there, the shadows cast by the sun were alien in shape and colours, and none of them had hands crawling to cling onto his ankles, to threaten to drag him in. 

“If you wish for him to serve as a representative,” Si-si said, keeping her voice even, “it is him who you should ask, not me.”

Zhou Yun laughed. “My husband has connections aplenty, so he has no need for such a thing.” She drew an empty saucer dish over, and tapped the tip of her cigarette against it. Without turning her head, she slid her eyes over to Si-si. “The serendipity here, Si-mei, is that, now, they will have even more chances to meet.”

When the shiver crawled down her spine, Si-si could not tell if it was because of the statement, or the title that Zhou Yun used. No, she thought, it was the latter, surely. That shuddering intimacy that reached around the table to wrap its fingers around her throat. 

Was this what Zi-dan felt like every single time that man appeared in front of him? Si-si parted her lips.

Before she could even half-form a reply, Zhou Yun dropped her head backwards, and her eyes lidded heavily. Si-si immediately tucked her hands on her lap, and set her heels against the ground. As the door slipped open, she was already on her feet.

“Mister Jiang,” she murmured, head lowered until her hair was in her eyes, shielding her from the sight of the man. “Welcome.”

“We have known each other for a long time,” Jiang Wen said. His voice, as usual, was a low, deep rumble that reminded Si-si of thunder vibrating through the air. “There’s no need for such formality.”

His eyes had the look of lightning flashing across heavy clouds during a thunderstorm. Si-si felt as if she was standing in an open field, the tallest thing around for miles without a single tree to take shelter under. She took a deep breath, and kept her head lowered as Jiang Wen took Zhou Yun’s hand, brushing his lips across her knuckles perfunctorily, before he took the seat beside her.

Si-si reached out for the teapot, and poured for him. 

“How has he been?” Jiang Wen asked.

“Busy,” Si-si replied, her eyes fixed upon the table. “I have returned from London with the children only two days ago, after attending the premiere of the latest movie.”

“Mm,” Jiang Wen said. He leaned closer to his wife, and the flame of her lighter cast dancing dark shadows across his face. “We were in London, too.” Beneath the table, Si-si’s fingers curled inwards. “We were visiting my brother.”

Jiang Wu. Yet another piece on the massive board that Si-si, with her poor eyesight, could never manage to see. Yet another piece of Jiang Wen that hovered by Zi-dan’s side, constant and unwavering.

“Did you like the city?” she heard herself ask.

“I suppose it was beautiful enough,” he returned. There was a rough-hewn smile in his voice. “The boys particularly liked Hyde Park when we visited it.”

It took almost much more effort than she could spare to not close her eyes. Si-si remembered the same park; remembered Zi-dan’s joy as he brought the children to the lake to see the birds that they had never before seen. She tried to not recall the smile on Zi-dan’s face, squatting there on the bare asphalt with his hands cupped around their son’s smaller ones, steadying them for the geese to approach.

Were those paths they took already marked by Jiang Wen’s footsteps by then? Were the shadows of the trees in the midmorning sunlight a different kind of shadow entirely? Si-si did not know and knew she would never have the answers. She took a deep breath, and lifted her head.

The humour creased into the sides of Jiang Wen’s eyes was nearly enough to make her twitch. She dragged her mouth upwards instead.

“Would you like me to inform him of this?”

“No,” Jiang Wen said. He tapped his cigarette on the edge of the saucer that Zhou Yun had nudged over to him. “I’d prefer to tell him that myself.”

“You will be seeing him soon, then?” Si-si asked. 

“Soon,” Jiang Wen. He smiled at her, thin-lipped and half-fading into the curling smoke around him. “He rarely comes to the mainland anymore, so I must go to him.”

 _He doesn’t come to the mainland anymore because he sees you in every shadow that passes by him,_ Si-si thought and did not say. _He heads for jobs two continents away from his family in his desperation to pull himself away from you_.

“Do you remember, Si-si,” Jiang Wen, his voice soft and almost contemplative, “why I chose you to be his?”

It was one afternoon, in a teahouse in the Xintiandi district of Shanghai, where the buildings were in the traditional style that turned time back in decades. Jiang Wen had chosen it, and it was appropriate in ways that suited him and his intentions perfectly: like a matchmaker in those decades-old stories, he had sat her parents and her down and laid out his terms and his offer, and Si-si knew her place well enough to not say a word as the rest of her life was planned out for her.

“For my silence,” Si-si said. She picked up her tea, and took a slow sip. “For my obedience.”

Jiang Wen clucked his tongue, and shook his head. Beside him, Zhou Yun laughed, and crushed her cigarette into the saucer. Ash spilled down from its sides, but she didn’t even spare it a glance. Her eyes were fixed firmly on Si-si instead.

“Don’t put yourself down so much,” she chided. “You’re a good mediator.”

 _Isn’t that exactly the same thing?_ The question showed in her eyes, surely, for Zhou Yun laughed. “Like here,” the woman said. “You know exactly what it is that you shouldn’t say aloud.” She spread out her fingers, and her smile turned lopsided. “Si-mei, you know where the deep waters are, and know you should skirt them instead of diving in.”

 _Coward_ , Si-si heard as she ducked her head down. She could not deny it either: all she had offered Zi-dan all of these years were warnings and deliberate silences, barely enough for him to wrap a thin layer of protection around himself. Never sufficient to stop him from being stripped to the bone, inch by inch.

Taking out another cigarette from her box, Zhou Yun looked at her. Her eyes were liquid-dark in the shivering flame that hovered above the silver lighter. When she pulled back, smoke escaped from her lips along with the words, “He chose you for the same reason why he rejected me.”

Despite herself, Si-si breath hitched, and her eyes widened. Here was a piece of the great board that no one else ever knew, dropped easily and casually into her hands; a gift that she didn’t deserve. A gift she didn’t know how she could ever earn.

She parted her lips, but nothing escaped.

“Don’t worry too much,” Jiang Wen drawled. He reached forward. The cigarette held between his fingers threatened to sear her skin as he patted the back of her hand. “Just continue doing what you are, now.”

This cue she knew: Si-si dipped her head, and murmured, “Of course.” She lifted her eyes to meet his, the sharp-dark obscured by the coiling smoke escaping from his mouth. “Should I accompany him during his travels?”

In that teahouse, fourteen years ago now, Si-si had sat in silence, eyes lowered and hands folded in her lap. She had glanced at the photograph of Zi-dan that Wen had brought, and thought that he was handsome enough that having sex with him would not be much of a chore. Then in that café, a few months afterwards, she had seen him on his knees and Jiang Wen’s cock in his mouth, and she had understood. She was meant to be a wife whose body existed for the cameras and the articles; whose eyes were to witness the tightness of the strings tangled around her husband’s ankles, and to understand them better than he himself did.

There were two kinds of women who lived in the marching shadows. 

“Your children need you here, in Hong Kong,” Jiang Wen stated. He crushed his cigarette into the saucer, and smiled with one side of his mouth. “Don’t they?”

She knew it was weakness, but she could not help closing her eyes. At the back of her lids, she saw: Zi-dan kneeling in front of their son, a bright-wide smile on his lips as he steadied his hands; her husband with one arm around their daughter, the other wrapped around the bumper car’s wheel as he laughed with his head thrown back, the sound loud and free. She saw: Zi-dan’s eyes sliding towards her, and the shadows creeping back in.

He could not forget. She did not blame him, for neither could she. Not even after she learned to love him. 

Tipping her head up, she brushed a heavy strand of hair out of her eyes. She smiled, wide enough to show a hint of teeth. “Of course they do,” she said. She raised her hands, and wrapped them around the tea. It had gone cold, but she sipped at it anyway. “But at times he will need me, nonetheless. Will you mind my presence, then?”

“If I do,” Jiang Wen cocked his head to the side, “will you still insist?”

Her hands threatened to shake, but she refused to allow them. There was only so much vulnerability that could be sold for gambling chips. She smiled above the rim of the cup. “Someone needs to be there to give him a warning,” she said, light.

Zhou Yun laughed. Her hand shook with the force of it as she lit up another cigarette, the flame flickering. But her gaze on Si-si remained heavy and steady. “Have you decided to grow some teeth?”

“They are not teeth,” Si-si corrected. The words did not come easily, for she knew far too well the sheer breadth and width of the board that she could barely see. “Merely an attempt to fulfil my duty as a mediator.” She placed her cup back onto the table. This time, it made a tiny _click_. “As you have named me.”

“Well,” Zhou Yun drawled out. With one elbow on the table, she turned to look at Jiang Wen. “That’s fair, isn’t it?”

Jiang Wen did not say a word; merely kept his eyes on her. When he turned away to light another cigarette, Si-si tried to make the easing of her breath less overt. She failed.

“Yes,” he said. Even through the smoke, his eyes seemed to bore through her, blistering her bones. “I suppose it is.”

Si-si dipped her head. She picked up her cup and downed the last dregs of her tea. A single leaf landed on her tongue, and she swallowed it.

“Thank you,” she said. She folded her hands once more in her lap, and moulded her smile into something far demurer as she dipped her head down. “I will not forget this boon, Mister Jiang.”

This was a dangerous game, and one she already knew she could not win. But she remembered the shadows in Zi-dan’s eyes. She remembered, too, years ago after one of Jiang Wen’s visits, how she had returned with her daughter to find Zi-dan’s hands trembling as he changed the sheets.

Perhaps none of this would culminate into anything. Perhaps this was simply a futile attempt to assuage her conscience; the selfish flailing of one who from birth was already drowning in darkness.

Standing up, she picked up the two menus left on the table. She turned them around, and held them out with her head bowed. “Do tell me what it is that you prefer,” she murmured.

Zhou Yun was smiling as she took hers, balancing the base of the bound book on her palm and allowing it fall open. Jiang Wen placed his back on the table, and rested his elbow above it. Si-si gave them both the same smile.

Fourteen years since they met. Twelve, now, since she married him. It was, she thought, time she at least tried. 

_End_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now it's done. I won't say that this fic is one of the darkest I've written, but it's up there. 
> 
> ... :3?

**Author's Note:**

> I am genuinely unsure if any of this is even good, and I didn’t manage to put in much of the stuff we learned when we went triad-hunting. But I hope you like it anyway, Niney my smol beeb. /sends squishes.
> 
> Please feed comments to the starving author. ❤


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